• Some users have recently had their accounts hijacked. It seems that the now defunct EVGA forums might have compromised your password there and seems many are using the same PW here. We would suggest you UPDATE YOUR PASSWORD and TURN ON 2FA for your account here to further secure it. None of the compromised accounts had 2FA turned on.
    Once you have enabled 2FA, your account will be updated soon to show a badge, letting other members know that you use 2FA to protect your account. This should be beneficial for everyone that uses FSFT.

CPU cycles and soundcards?

G

Gnasher

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Jan 28, 2011
Messages
1,140
Someone is claiming on another forum that onboard sound uses more cpu cycles than a discrete soundcard. I pointed out that there is no hardware acceleration in Vista/Win7 for soundcards so that is not true. I also said if there is any dif in performance then it would come down to the quality of the software driver and nothing to do with the hardware. Am I right or am I right?

This does not apply to Creative cards that have Alchemy drivers for certain games.
 
Gnasher said:
I pointed out that there is no hardware acceleration in Vista/Win7 for soundcards so that is not true.
Click to expand...
If you're going through WASAPI, DirectSound or XAudio 2, that's correct. If you're going through OpenAL, that is not correct. The HAL isn't exposed through the Windows APIs any longer, but that has absolutely no bearing on other APIs which can have direct hardware access and provide hardware acceleration.
 
Yes, that is why I made the comment about Alchemy, it goes through OpenAL. I have OpenAL drivers installed but think I only have about 2 games out of 100 that actually use those drivers.
 
I've been under the impression that ALchemy is supposed to help offload the sound to the card. Basically, you use ALchemy when a game is not OpenAL so that the sound card can properly handle it.

In Valve/Source engine games, if I want 7.1 sound, I have to configure ALchemy to work with the games otherwise 7.1 discrete won't work any other way so ALchemy must be doing something.
 
Perhaps, but AFAIK Alchemy hooks into OpenAL to provide hardware acceleration. Maybe I should put my X-Fi back in and see if it is an improvement in games over the current onboard Realtek I am using. I don't need it for music though because I have the superior EMU 0404 USB for that purpose.
 
Do some benchmark runs and record the results. Then put the sound card back in and do the same tests again and you can see what kind of, if any, changes are made to your performance.
If you do, let us know what you find.
No idea what to suggest for benchmarks to run.
 
Nor do I. The game developer is claiming stuttering that some people experience in their game is caused by onboard audio and suggests using discrete audio to fix it. How does one even measure stuttering in a game?
 
If they are actual frame rate stutters and not stuttering related to bad internal timing/ticking (which may cause stuttering in the simulation component), you can measure it by recording how long each frame takes to render (frame time) and then evaluating discrepancies in those frame times. FRAPS may be able to log frame times, but I don't know for sure, because they don't publish an actual feature list.
 
Onboard sound does use CPU cycles. Nearly every soundcard on the market has no true DSP and the drivers use the CPU to do all calculations. The only soundcard left on the market that uses it's own DSP is the Sound Blaster X-Fi xtremegamer and the titaniums. They will hardware accelerate all native vista/7 games through OpenAL or directsound games through Alchemy.
 
Last edited:
I know they use cpu for processing but no more than any other soundcard, except the X-Fi as you claim, didn't know XFi routs all Vista/Win7 games go through OpenAL though. Thought that only applied to games that can use Alchemy. You sure about that?

My X-Fi is the old Xtreme music version and there is not much dif between it and Xtremegamer version so it should do as you claim too, right?
 
No the XtremeMusic is a hardware DSP just like xtremegamer so you are good there. However as I understand it all native 7/vista games have to use OpenAL since directsound is gone. Alchemy is only for only native XP games that are still looking to use directsound (or whatever it's called).
 
You can run benchmarks like others have said, but I do not believe a sound card with acceleration will make a significant enough difference to distinguish it from the standard deviation of your tests.

Sound cards helped out more when users had single-core CPUs, but CPUs are so much faster these days. You almost always have lots of spare cycles.

I can, with confidence say that if you are looking for increased performance don't look for it in a sound card, you are better off putting that $75-150 toward a faster CPU instead. That will net you a lot more performance.

The only users I would see bothering with a sound card for performance is users who have a slow dual-core CPU and an existing spare sound card just lying around.
 
OFaceSIG said:
However as I understand it all native 7/vista games have to use OpenAL since directsound is gone.
Click to expand...
DirectSound has been deprecated - it isn't gone. And, no, not all games have to use OpenAL. There are new Windows APIs: XAudio 2 and X3DAudio which are interfaces to the new audio stack. Games can also bypass any API and route directly through WASAPI, and some middleware solutions do exactly that.
 
Either way even if a game or API dumps directly through to WASAPI the card still has to process this. Now it may not be calculating positional audio etc but the X-Fi still has to output that sound and the driver work what little their may be will still be done by the DSP so it still helps a little.
 
There's nothing to be done. The card gets the number of streams equal to the number of speakers defined in the Windows control panel already resampled, processed (if any) and mixed (not necessarily in that order). The only thing the DSP can do at that point is whatever you can coax out of it via the Creative control panel (CMSS3D, EQ, etc.).

Basically: No HAL, no money.
 
Think I will put my X-Fi back in later this week just for kicks but am not expecting any improvement really. I have quad core i5@3.8ghz so my PC is no slouch. I just want to see if it does lessen stutters as the developer said it might.
 
Well there is a qualitative difference at least for me with the quality of audio I get from a discrete a card (asus or creative) versus onboard. To me onboard always sounds worse, cpu cycle usage or not.
 
Onboard sound comes with funky control systems. For example, my son's PC with Realtek HD Audio is constantly causing him to have to mess with his microphone settings for Teamspeak. I don't have that problem at all on my PC with a X-Fi. Back when he was running WinXP, we just dropped in my old SB Live! card and problem solved... but that card isn't allowed on Vista so we are back to the Realtek.

That's my biggest beef with Onboard. You would think that the most "common" sound solution would have better controls.
 
Controls seem pretty good if you use Microsoft provided drivers but that is not possible on XP. For mic I use a USB headset and that is just plug and play on Vista/Win7 too. Soundcard SQ is no issue for me either because I send a digital signal from the MB audio to an external EMU 0404 for music listening and the EMU is also connected to a separate tube headphone amp. My only interest in doing this is improved gameplay performance and no other reason.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top