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Discrete vs Integrated Sound: Latency

T

TIGR

Limp Gawd
Joined
Aug 17, 2008
Messages
133
Hi [H], been a long time since I posted here. I'm not much into computers and tech any more but do still game once in a while, and in a gaming forum I frequent, the superiority of sound cards over motherboard-integrated sound was brought up. This was specifically in regards to sound quality. But what about latency?

What I mean is this: if you are playing a fast-paced multiplayer FPS game, and another player makes a sound, will that sound make it to your speakers a little faster or slower based on whether you have discrete or integrated sound? Much in the same way that one might ask which monitor has more input lag, I'm asking which type of audio device introduces more latency, because the human brain processes audio more quickly than it processes visual signals, making any latency in the audio stream undesirable.

My thinking is that it will probably depend on architecture and bus (is the posited sound card connected via PCI, PCI Express, maybe even USB?—let's stick to internal sound cards for this discussion). But it seems to me that there'd be a tendency for integrated sound to be lower-latency in most modern systems. Am I wrong?

I'm also thinking the difference is probably inconsequential. This is primarily a theoretical discussion about latency, but it would be more practical if anyone could put into perspective just how big the latency difference, if any, might be. Bear in mind that the focus here is on latency, independent of other aspects of sound (e.g. sound "quality" and CPU usage). I don't mind if this goes off-topic but would like to talk about latency above all.

By the way, I also posted this question at TPU, in case anyone wants to view replies there.

Thanks!
 
No, doesn't matter. I mean if you were talking USB, then maybe there's more latency, but not in terms of things hanging off the PCI bus. Remember the "integrated" sound actually isn't, it isn't on the CPU or anything. It hangs off the PCIe bus, just like anything else.

Also as a practical matter all the latency you get is from the processing done, by the game and OS, and the buffers to prevent dropouts. A PCIe soundcard can get sub-ms latency if you use ASIO and turn the buffers down.
 
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