Sound card worth it?

J

jfuze

Limp Gawd
Joined
Feb 21, 2008
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I've read so many different opinions about sound cards, I figured i'd make a thread and see what everyone thought here.

First off, would putting a $30 Sound Blaster card help my system performance over on-board audio from the motherboard? Or do sound cards only affect what you hear and not necessarily how the system runs a game or program?

Second, how exactly does a USB headset work? Does it have built in sound and you just plug it in, or should you have a good sound card if you are using one of those too?

any help with these stupid questions would be great :confused:
 
Your sound card does not influence performance of your system. It only improve the quality of the sound. A basic $30 Sound Blaster card is prety much equivalent to onboard sound in therm of quality.

A usb headset have built-in sound card. It is totally independent from other audio devices.
 
noxlord said:
Your sound card does not influence performance of your system.
Click to expand...
Enabling sound is, by itself, a performance penalty. Buffer playback, mixing, DSP, resampling and other processes require some amount of CPU time when performed in software. Some cards minimize this penalty, offloading the audio's processing impact to dedicated hardware and allowing other processes (AI, physics, rendering, whatever) to utilize more of the CPU's available processing power, assuming the application uses an API that supports this on whatever OS in question, leading to possibly-improved performance.

If you don't have the right answer to someone's question, don't answer.
 
phide, you're talking about 1-5% processor power there. And since jfuze was comparing with onboard sound, both use the same negligible amount of cpu power. Even an X-FI won't offload you cpu for audio playback, unless you're using fancy DSP features like EAX.
 
Mind that he's concerned about performance in gaming, nox, not just generic audio playback.

The Tech Report has some raw RightMark CPU utilization numbers here, and some actual game benchmarks starting here. Realistically, the benefits of using a hardware-based sound card are generally minor, but still evident. As voice counts increase, the performance advantage of the X-Fi and other Sound Blasters over onboard codecs increases.
 
There are other benifits to having a sound card. I picked up an Audigy 2 Value at Fry's for $20, which not only slightly increases performance, but also lets me use hardware OpenAL in Unreal 3. If you can find a cheap sound card with dedicated hardware, I think its worth it.
 
In my opinion, they are worth every penny. I didn't realize how big the sound improvement was over any integrated sound. The X-Fi cards can actually relieve your system RAM and CPU. I remember when I installed my first sound card. A Creative Labs X-Fi XtremeGamer card. It raised my FPS by 5 frames and reduced the number of hic-ups I had playing, especially in games that used lots of memory. Not only that, I had amazing sound!
 
It does make a difference in performance, if you choose a sound card like X-Fi which processes sound within its own little 'cpu'.
You will see a performance only if your games are being bottlenecked by the cpu though and with an x-fi you'd be reducing cpu load. If your system is bottlenecked by the gfx card, or insufficient ram, installing an x-fi wouldn't be making a difference.
Also if you're running vista you won't be seeing any improvement. Vista makes it that all sound gets processed by the CPU, so even if you get a good card capable of taking the load off the CPU if you have Vista it wouldn't be working that way. Creative labs are working on a beta to get around this, but it's still either beta or not released, I'm not sure because I didn't keep myself up to date on it since I have XP.

What I can say from experience is that the x-fi xtreme music I bought last year made a great difference from onboard, both in performance and in sound quality.
 
Black Panther said:
Also if you're running vista you won't be seeing any improvement. Vista makes it that all sound gets processed by the CPU, so even if you get a good card capable of taking the load off the CPU if you have Vista it wouldn't be working that way. Creative labs are working on a beta to get around this, but it's still either beta or not released, I'm not sure because I didn't keep myself up to date on it since I have XP.
.
Click to expand...

Really? I feel ripped off. Does this also occur in games that have an option to enable hardware acceleration, like Unreal 3 with hardware OpenAL?
 
bholstege said:
Really? I feel ripped off. Does this also occur in games that have an option to enable hardware acceleration, like Unreal 3 with hardware OpenAL?
Click to expand...

He is correct. Vista has done away with DirectSound3D, blaming it for instability in XP or some such crap. Creative has made a program called Alchemy that works in tandem with X-Fi and Audigy cards/drivers that effectively translates DirectSound3D to OpenAL, restoring 3D sound and EAX. If a game already uses OpenAL then it will work as advertised as X-Fi already supports it natively.

Here's the home page for Alchemy. It has a list of the games that it supports and there is a forum for getting additional assistance.
http://connect.creativelabs.com/alchemy/default.aspx

Here is a thread on another forum that has a lot of useful information regarding X-Fi and Vista.
http://forums.techpowerup.com/showthread.php?t=40613

Hope it helps, I know I was damn near devastated when i heard about what they did with Vista and DirectSound3D
 
You can just copy the Dsound.dlls into a game that isnt on the list and it will works. People do it all the time, or you can manaully add the game to the list with the Alchemy add game to list thing.

I just copy the dlls over and I haven had a game which didnt work with it.
 
There are a couple music players than can run through OpenAL (you could write a very basic one in five to ten minutes), but there's very little advantage in doing that. More commonly, players use WaveOut (the basic, no-frills Windows audio output component), while others might have the ability to use ASIO, a very pure and direct low-latency protocol created by Steinberg. There's also kernel streaming output, which is a way to route audio through the Windows audio layer, but bypassing the semi-destructive Windows XP kMixer.

How much CPU usage music playback might demand depends on which API your player uses, what format the music is in (raw versus lossless versus lossy), and what real-time plug-ins you're using, if any, but there isn't any significant advantage to routing two channel music through an alternative API from a CPU-usage perspective. Your proc is plenty fast, so you really don't have to worry about the performance hit associated with playing back a measly two channels of audio. When the time comes when you're mixing 64 or 128 voices with a few effects per voice, then it's time to start thinking about a hardware-based card.
 
Anygame that uses OpenAL can and will be able to use the X-Fi just fine. Two examples of OpenAL games are Bf2 and 2142. They work just the same under Vista as they would under XP.

Here is a list of titles that use OpenAL instead of DirectSound.
http://www.openal.org/titles.html

You maybe suprised at how long OpenAL has been going and just how irrelevant DirectSound is becoming, especially with the release of Vista.
 
Will there be a noticeable difference onboard (IP35 Pro) vs separate if I am outputting sound to a receiver (Onkyo 605)?
 
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