SoundCard for increased FPS?

200mg

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jun 7, 2006
Messages
134
I have noticed a significant amount of lag in BF:BC2 when there's alot of explosions, gunfire, and/or alarms going off simultaneously. I am playing on med. sound settings in game. I am currently using onboard sound on my ABIT IP35-Pro which uses a Realtek ALC888. Being that I am only seeing the lag when theres alot of sound involved I was wondering if getting an add-in soundcard would help with my issues. I hover between 40 and 60 fps during most of the game. If it is sound can anyone suggest a sub $100 card that they've noticed made an in game difference?



AbitIP35-Pro
Iq9550 @ 3.2
8800gtx
4gb XMS2
 
I highly doubt it's a sound issue. Processing sound in games takes barely any CPU power, and with a medium-high end quad core such as yours, it should NOT be impacting game performance the way you describe.

Perhaps you could run the Kaspersky getsysteminfo utility here: http://forum.kaspersky.com/index.php?showtopic=36444

And then link to the results of the parser. It will give us a better idea as to what exactly is running on your system. Don't worry, there is no personal information given out when you use it.
 
The hit from onboard is typically a very small percentage. What you are probably dealing with is the physics load of collision detection during big combat scenes, which are very CPU intensive, especially if there is any smoke.
 
The hit from onboard is typically a very small percentage. What you are probably dealing with is the physics load of collision detection during big combat scenes, which are very CPU intensive, especially if there is any smoke.

I was also thinking about that as well, given that when theres alot of explosions going off there's alot of debris flying around and my gfx card has to account for that. Well...good to know, I was gonna try and take the $100 way out, (sound card) but now looks like i'll have to go the $400 way out (upgrade to 5870)
 
I was gonna try and take the $100 way out, (sound card) but now looks like i'll have to go the $400 way out (upgrade to 5870)

aww man that card looks sick. way to not give all your $$ to nVidia like i see other ppl doing in other threads
 
BFBC2 uses all CPU for sound according to the devs. They wrote their own sound engine and having a quad will take full advantage of it. As for fps in the beta, there are some tweaks around, like turning off bloom and forcing DX9.

But yeah upgrading to a 5870 will be your best bet.
 
BC2 is configured for software buffering only by default. You have to specifically go into the INI and change it to either hardware or X-Fi to see any changes. In the current beta build, X-Fi mode isn't working for me. Hardware does work fine. Battlefield games have used OpenAL since BF2 and it's worked fairly well.
 
BFBC2 uses all CPU for sound according to the devs. They wrote their own sound engine and having a quad will take full advantage of it. As for fps in the beta, there are some tweaks around, like turning off bloom and forcing DX9.

But yeah upgrading to a 5870 will be your best bet.

Having nothing more than a dual core with a high freq will take "full advantage" of it.

In Bad Company, all audio processing is performed sequentially on a single hardware thread regardless of platform. For PC this means that a CPU with a higher frequency will help more than one with more cores. But of course, there are other areas of the game that execute in parallel, so having more than 2 cores will help the game in general.
http://blogs.battlefield.ea.com/bat.../22/an-audiophile-s-guide-to-bf-bc2-full.aspx
 
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