How much does a proper soundcard help with fps?

^This.

 

How about yall with soundcards just test it out for the rest of us...

 

Stop spreading false information. Nothing but BS is all you are posting here...

 

Got any proof on this? Personally I can't see why PCI soundcards will slow down the system compared to a PCIe soundcard. Sound doesn't require that much bandwidth, I highly doubt sound requires more than 133 MB/s of bandwidth that 32-bit PCI at 33 MHz provides. Even for the fact that PCI does device arbitration doesn't add so much delay in the transaction that you'll see any frame drops either. You'll only see performance degradation between PCI and PCIe (for a device that transfers below the PCI bandwidth) can only be found in time-sensitive environment and gaming isn't really very time-sensitive compared to many corporate and scientific grade solutions.

My Auzentech X-Raider 7.1 is a PCI card and it works perfectly and isn't detrimental to my framerates at all.

deltatux

 

When I read $hit like this, I laugh...lol

 

I don't see any reason why a sound card would improve performance, unless your CPU is getting severely bottlenecked. And I mean that your CPU is truly at 100% and your GPU is not working at its full potential.
That's the only case I can think of where a sound card with a processing unit would help. But that wouldn't be by much anyway.

 

For a soundcard to potentially improve performance of an application the application will need to use a sound library that supports hardware acceleration, like EAX (mostly only X-Fi cards) and OpenAL. So long as your soundcard provider develops drivers that support acceleration of these standards in hardware you should see a measurable difference.

Problem 1: Sound processing hardware hasn't really moved since 2005 so I imagine a game today could have the ability to overwhelm a sound card using hardware acceleration making it more feasible to do on the CPU.

Problem 2: Most developers make their own software sound engine making the hardware processing of a sound card redundant.

Sound processing in hardware didn't take off like graphics processing in hardware did. You'd best not worry about how many FPS a sound card will net you because in most cases it'd probably be nothing.

 

Like I already said, the differences are way too small to be worried about these days but anyway, if a motherboard has to deal with both PCIe (vidcard) and PCI (soundcard) then it will consume extra system resources to handle both types of communication simultaneously. In Windows, just go into Device Manager and look for the PCI Bridge and the PCI Bus device drivers - both listed under System Devices.

On some motherboards however, a PCIe x1 soundcard can still slow down fps enough for it to become somewhat visible in the real world sometimes. For example, a Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD3 motherboard with two PCIe vidcards on it will drop the PCIe from x16 x16 mode to x16 x8 mode if a PCIe x1 card is added - whereas for example an Asus P6X58D-E motherboard does not suffer from anything like that at all.

 

It made a difference in the days of single cores. Less with dual cores, almost none with quads.

 

likewise, you're the one who's full of bs and clueless like a monkey, same goes for Trumutton and Kanej :stewpid:.


I tested it and i saw, why did i mention Dirt1 a?? This was the most noticeable game, up to 7-10fps on avg/min and yes even on a quad later on up to 5fps :bathit:


Better think before you all speak up.

 

Proof or its FUD...also the game you metion is a 4 year old game. We are taking MODERN here not 4 freaken years ago!!

 

^ I agree. The full hardware implementation of EAX used to be worth consideration even though it was expensive - but that was before I moved from the stone age to the bronze age. lol

 

i dont need to proof anything to you!

And doesn't matter if its 4years old it uses all eax5 fx anyway. Any game that uses real hw openAL will see benefits and faster fps.


Test the game and see for yourself, oh wait you can't on your fake eax 2.0 sb.


I rest my case.

 

F1 2010.

With hardware acceleration:


With software processing:


No difference (min framerate is within margin of error). Nuff said.

FYI there's no difference in Mirror's Edge either.

 

Only Creative 20K1 based cards have hardware DSP chips....

By your definition, a "proper" sound card is only produced by Creative....as they're the only company using a hardware DPS chip....which is far from true.

Also, good luck finding a "proper" Network card (based on YOUR bs definition)...as nearly all consumer network cards use the CPU for flow control, as opposed to having an actual Network Processing Unit.....Unless you want to buy an Intel server grade network card or a POS Killer NIC....

Xonar cards range in price from $35USD to $300USD....

I tested my X-Fi XtremeGamer vs Onboard vs Asus Xonar DG and saw no FPS difference.....

Creative does have the industry's worst drivers....and from MY experience dealing with Creative, they don't support their products at all....

 

PCIe is designed to look like PCI to the operating system, that's why they look the same when in fact they're completely separate from each other. It doesn't take any extra system resources to use both PCI and PCIe.

I can't see how a PCIe soundcard can slow down your system's framerates considering how PCIe doesn't share bandwidth at all. The serial links between device and controller is dedicated to that device that's connected. PCIe unlike PCI doesn't share any resources at all.

PCI however, does share resources on each controller. Motherboards tend to include several PCI controllers to reduce latency due to device arbitration.

I haven't seen any real world data that shows PCI or PCIe soundcards slows down the graphical system. Heck, even the PCIe lanes of the GPU doesn't go to the same end point as PCIe x1 or x4 lanes. GPU PCIe lanes are connected directly to the Northbridge (or directly to the CPU for Lynnfield and Sandy Bridge CPUs) while the PCIe x1 and x4 lanes are usually connected to the southbridge.

EDIT: Even though onboard sound is integrated to the motherboard, they're still connected to the system via PCI or a PCIe lane to the southbridge . So it makes no difference between onboard and add-on soundcard in this regards.

deltatux

 

You rest your case? Look at Anarion's proof!

nuff said!!

 

I've been using add-on sound cards since Ad-lib (that's over 20 years ago - are u even that old) and about the same goes for Creative products and i can't remember one single problem that arose in all that time. Currenty running five (5) X-Fi cards without a single issue...

 

Lets see; even if you were to gain 5-10 fps by using an addon soundcard, the price to performance ratio is stupid. 100$ or more for an avg of 7fps? IMO if you're willing to pay that much for JUST fps, buy a new video card ; problem solved.

 

It doesn't improve the speed at all in my case but it sure does make difference in sound quality.