Sound Cards

[MonkGF]

MonkGF, DirectSound does not exist in Vista, nor Windows 7.  It was replaced with stub function calls to the Windows Sound API, or empty function calls where nothing matched in Windows.

The DLL's supplied for these high end sound cards is an attempt to get around the Windows Sound API, by making use of ASIO support, which was also pulled from Vista and Windows 7.  ASUS and Creative, both, have recreated the ASIO driver support, but it is quite flaky and interferes with the Windows Sound API.

Sorry, was just trying to simplify things a bit. I think we're saying the same thing here.

Sound engineers have been left with two choices.  Stick with Windows XP, or move to Apple hardware.

Yeah, I really hated it when Microsoft made this change on Vista. But I understood the position given how badly audio drivers were (and still are despite the change) causing stability issues. I remember moving from Intel's RSX to DirectSound3D just when the 3D hardware audio cards were coming out, and man did that turn out to be a flash in the pan.

[MonkGF]

So i think what im hearing is, stay with the on board sound,and go with a great pair of headphones...?

Yes, unless you are picky about sound quality, in which case you might want the nicer outputs on the add-on soundcard.

[MonkGF]

Negative thats what happens when a sound chip relies upon the cpu for processing power. There are complete card solutions that also rely upon the cpu and lag issues will develop in AH because of it. If you havent experienced this its only a matter of time until you do UNLESS you already have an adequate sound card.

Some sample benchmarks, I may run some myself this weekend comparing CPU load with my Xonar, onboard Realtek, and sound off completely, but from Tech Report's review of the Xonar running under Vista Ultimate:

http://techreport.com/articles.x/14500/4

That seems like a pretty common theme across the board in all reviews I've read and matching my personal experience. Unless you are on the ragged edge of memory and bus bandwidth, software audio won't be much of a performance blip at all.

Look, I was running software 3D audio routines back in the days of 133 MHz PCs with 16MB of RAM. You could run a couple of 3D sources at reasonable (for the day) framerates, especially if you had a hardware 3D video card so you weren't also running a software rasterizer. When the 3D hardware audio cards first came out, they made a huge difference in the number of 3D sources you could run simultaneously and the quality you could get out of them, but you could still run a handful of 3D sources and maintain reasonable (for the day) framerates using the software solutions. In these days of multicore 2+ GHz machines with 1GB+ of RAM, you don't think there's some room to run sound mixing of 3D sources on a tiny corner of one of those processors using a fraction of the available RAM?

The biggest performance impact from sound code these days is usually streaming the data off disk, since you're often also streaming textures, and for higher-end games other content as well, and all those systems are competing for hard drive resources. The sound guys on the consoles screamed bloody murder when we started talking about needing to stream other content off the DVDs, given how slow the DVD drives are compartively speaking. When you see an explosion go off in some game and see a hitch in framerate, it's texture and sound streaming biting you, rarely CPU.

[Chalenge]

Those benchmarks are using cards that are all comparable and obviously hand picked to give neighborhood results and worse only took into account a span of one minute for the tests. The problems that this sort of card runs into will not be seen in that time span and as far as AH goes the benchmarks used are meaningless.

The problem with audio and AH is the way every single one of those cards act when transitioning from low-action areas to high-action areas. In other words... if you are flying along from one base to another and you are chatting with your wingman the load is fairly easy to work out with a low cpu requirement. Once you get to your target area you dive into the town area and you find GVs and attackers hitting the GVs. Suddenly your sound card has to work out 3D positions and play multiple sounds simultaneously. That Realtek will be the first one to start dropping operations and sounds that should be heard will fail to play. GVs will have their sound transposed to spots where they are not and worst of all the CPU will have to shuffle off operations as it makes room for audio processing loading new sounds and applying skins. CHOKE! (Okay... Im not an engineer and I cant explain precisely the problem but thats the experience). On hand experience with these cards and onboard chips has lead me to this conclusion. I dont own stock in Creative and if you really want to know the truth I hate sound blaster because of marketing ploys in Creatives past. If I didnt have to use their card I wouldnt but in the end after all the testing was done their premium gaming card wins out over everything else.

XtremeMusic is not a good game card and not much of a music card. Xonar is noisy and uses a little too much cpu also (actually doubles its requirement in the scenario I outlined) and worse its the noisiest of those in the benchmark.

Monk I already explained that I have tried every audio solution available and I meant it. Even a 4 GHz processor will choke down and create stutters under these conditions even with minimum processes running and the fastest hard drives video cards and memory you can install. Even the best sound card can have problems but like I have already said if you want to enjoy AH and be able to pinpoint the position of GVs by sound the best card is the X-Fi Titanium Fatality Champion (or Pro). There are other cards that can produce better audio for CDs and movies or games without 3D requirements but for AH thats the one. Performance for vox is not what it could be but audio cards are a trade off anyway and probably there never will be a good all-in-one solution for gaming and music and so on.

Last replay on this. Everyone knows how much I hate repeating myself. 

[MonkGF]

GVs will have their sound transposed to spots where they are not and worst of all the CPU will have to shuffle off operations as it makes room for audio processing loading new sounds and applying skins. CHOKE!

Thanks for coming back around to my point: there's a ton more going on here than audio, and audio is not the root cause of the problem, a too-heavily-loaded system is. You are describing a scenario where suddenly the game has to initiate lots of operations: textures, audio data, etc, and it's choking your particular setup. Offloading just a tiny bit of work, or sometimes even turning down a single option, can convert you from seeing a choppy mess to a smooth experience when you are riding that edge.

The classic example here deals with vsynch. If you are running a 60Hz monitor at 60 FPS, that's around 16mS per frame. If you suddenly take 17mS to render a frame, now the monitor draws the same frame twice while waiting for the next frame to be ready, and suddenly you are at 30 FPS and have 15mS (or so) of your machine basically sitting idle waiting on the vsynch so it can send the next frame to the video card, all because you crossed a very small threshold. And worse if you are toggling between 16mS and 17mS to prep a frame, you'll get a very choppy experience, as you show one game frame for one video frame, then the next game frame for two video frames, etc. The human eye is very susceptible to fluctuating framerates, where a machine jumping around between 40 and 50 can look worse than one running at a smooth consistent 30. So if you have a machine that is just barely running the game at 60Hz, then yes a relatively minor change in throughput can lead to a MUCH better experience for you, but that doesn't mean that all or most or necessarily even a fair percentage of other machines will see the same improvement with a similar change.

As for noise on the Xonar, I've never noticed it. Disclaimer: I am NOT an audiophile. I can tell improved sound quality between the crappy stereo speakers I had plugged into the Realtek and the headphones I've got now plugged into the Xonar, but I also think WMA-compressed music sounds fine and am using speakers that cost maybe $300 total in my living room 5.1 setup and am ecstatic, so I may not be the type who would pick up on the kind of noise you are talking about. If you can pick up noise like that, then yes buy the absolute best quality output you can find, and you probably do want to check out lots and lots of options, possibly even multiple instances of the same model, to find one that can satisfy your tastes. Sound quality is the primary reason for an addon sound card in most systems, not a major jump in performance on the system.

[Chalenge]

Your not getting it. A machine that can hit 60 fps EASILY can be turned into a useless piece of hardware by a bad sound system. USB is typically the worst. Onboard sound is not far behind it but it is possible that a sound card can be worse and yes sound blaster used to make one prime example.

Monk your never going to get it. Have a nice day.

[MonkGF]

Negative thats what happens when a sound chip relies upon the cpu for processing power.

Your not getting it. A machine that can hit 60 fps EASILY can be turned into a useless piece of hardware by a bad sound system.

The reason this conversation has gone on so long is the disconnect between these two statements. Relying on the CPU for audio processing does NOT NECESSARILY kill a system. A bad sound system certainly CAN kill a system, I don't disagree with that, especially with the state of drivers these days, and it can come from any source, onboard, USB, or addon.

And maybe a second disconnect here is OS choice. I would agree with you when talking XP and the older DirectSound model. Before Vista came along and changed things, onboard audio was a HORRIBLE choice for a gaming system. With recent systems and a modern OS like Windows 7, onboard audio is not the pariah it once was, and can be a perfectly adequate choice for gaming.

I'm arguing with your first statement, not your second. So if we want to leave it off with your second one, that picking the right audio for your system is an important task and that you may have to try several different options to find something with the performance, stability, and output quality you desire, I'm fine with that. Just don't globally knock onboard audio solutions, as things have changed greatly in that arena over the last couple of years.

[Ghosth]

Ok speaking from my personal experience, ever onboard sound system either had terrible sound, or it had mic problems.

Put in any kind of a semi decent sound card and you had better sound, no mic problems, and less CPU workload.

While sound may not be all of the cause of that workload, as noted above it certainly adds to it.

Onboard sound is BS, fine yours works for you, ok. But as a general rule you can not recomend it for AH because it will significantly impact FPS as compared to most cards.

And even you Monk don't know how much your sound could be better, and your framerates better, because your stuck
on your onboard sound. Open your mind, do a little real testing for yourself before you preach that gospel in here.
Because your coming across like a Satanist preaching in a Baptist Church on Sun morning. I have to tell you, your message isn't coming through brother.

Everyone believes in the Gospel of Skuzzy around here for very very good very simple reasons.

He's been doing this for years. He is almost never wrong, not about hardware.

[MonkGF]

And even you Monk don't know how much your sound could be better, and your framerates better, because your stuck
on your onboard sound. Open your mind, do a little real testing for yourself before you preach that gospel in here.
Because your coming across like a Satanist preaching in a Baptist Church on Sun morning. I have to tell you, your message isn't coming through brother.

Okay, fine. I tried. For the record, you are wrong on the first point, for two reasons. One, I do have a Xonar in my current machine, I've said as much. It went in over the summer when I got my Sennheisser headphones for the amp, as I've said in the thread. I used to have it, but pulled it due to stability issues on my Win7 64-bit box, but they updated drivers and I turned off the GX stuff, so it's working well now. And yes, sound quality is much better. Framerate across my game portfolio (in addition to Aces High, included Borderlands, FallOut 3, some Mass Effect 2) did not change one whit. My wife also plays Borderlands with me on a Core 2 Duo with onboard audio, and getting into a firefight with lots of enemies, bullets, and explosions doesn't hurt her performance at all.

And on the second point, I HAVE opened my mind. I used to be VERY anti-onboard audio, originally due to even worse drivers than the soundcards had (and once upon a time, I was supporting 3D sound code on those machines), but Vista forced me to try it for a while. At the time with the lousy speakers I had, I noticed no difference in either quality or performance (good headphones have certainly shown me a difference in quality since). When work was upgrading machines to P4Ds and then Core2s (and beyond, that's when it started), we stopped including soundcards and went with onboard audio, and they haven't had a hitch either (and yes, these play a lot of high end games with lots of 3D sound on a regular basis). Things have CHANGED in the audio realm, and the same advice given back when we all had 1.8 GHz P4s and onboard AC97 sound with Windows XP as our main machines don't NECESSARILY apply when running today's 3 GHz Core i7s running Windows 7 64-bit with modern HD audio chips on them.

But fine, I'm out, I'll shut up with the advice and education attempts if it is not welcome.

[Speed55]

MonkGF, DirectSound does not exist in Vista, nor Windows 7.  It was replaced with stub function calls to the Windows Sound API, or empty function calls where nothing matched in Windows.

The DLL's supplied for these high end sound cards is an attempt to get around the Windows Sound API, by making use of ASIO support, which was also pulled from Vista and Windows 7.  ASUS and Creative, both, have recreated the ASIO driver support, but it is quite flaky and interferes with the Windows Sound API.

Sound engineers have been left with two choices.  Stick with Windows XP, or move to Apple hardware.

The bold is what is killing me and many other home recording musicians. Under xp I had no issues at all recording music. Under Windows 7 64 bit, even with the latency turned to 1ms using the xonar asio setting,  there is still a minor audible delay. I can get by recording, but will probably install another hard drive and dual boot with xp 32 bit because it's perfect.