Sound Cards and System Performance

Dempsey

On my old computer is on-board sound, if I upgrade to a PCI sound card, say SB Live! value, will system performance improve, ignore sound quality improving.
Also if i reletively new system has the card i just mentioned, and I upgrade to a audigy platinum will the system performance improve.

Would the old system improve its performance more by just having a PCI soundcard rather than a on-board?

Would the new system be better off having a Audigy Platinum than a SB Live! Value?

Inspector Gadget

As I understand it, some so-called "AC '97" onboard systems use a certain amount of CPU cycles to perform their duties (DSP filters, methinks), much like the whole WinModem mess. I suspect that using a hardware sound card instead of such a component will help an older system a little, but not much - possibly not even enough to be noticeable on most (fast-ish) systems... if a proper hardware model such as the AD Soundmax chips are used, then there'll be no real difference.

As regards performance increases going from an SB Live to an Audigy on a new system, I doubt there'll be any improvement whatsoever...

Gadget

Gerry

It really depends on how old the machine is. If the sound card is isa, you will probably get a mild improvement from going to pci. However if it is onboard, it is likely to be pci already ( I've a gateway p166 motherboard here with excellent integrated pci sound ). In that case you would get little to no improvement. A much bigger factor in performance wrt sound cards is your motherboard chipset. If the chipset is crap at handling your sound card, it may drive up cpu utilization. If you search this board for "audio benchmark" or something like that, you should be able to find a thread where a test was done with the same sound card on 2 different platforms, intel bx and via kt133a, and the via seemed to have much higher cpu utilization.

longword

This isn't about ISA vs. PCI - ISA audio hasn't been done for years and it was quite rare to see it onboard (though I've got such a board myself). This is about the acceleration features provided by the card.

The SB Live! and Audigy cards both include DirectSound acceleration. At its most basic level, this allows the card to play multiple audio tracks simultaneously - with the mixing of the channels performed on the card itself. Takes a bit of a load off the CPU, and a bit off your system bus. Without the acceleration, you have the data going from RAM to the CPU, stealing a bit of CPU time for mixing, back to RAM in a mixed form, then off to the sound card DMA. With it, the sound card DMA's the data straight from RAM. It's the same story if you want 3D positional audio acceleration.

Exactly how much this matters I can't say, but I know it's measurable in Q3A fps.

Dempsey

Well on the directx diagnostic it says that the sound is software accelerated, that would suggest that the CPU has to fiddle with the sound somewhat, but how much? Would it be noticable, say playing games?

Gerry

I mentioned isa because a pci sound card with no hardware acceleration could still improve fps due to more efficient transfers to and from memory.
My main point was that the motherboard chipset can make a difference to how much cpu time the sound card takes up, with an identical sound card. This can be very noticeable, but I haven't managed to find the thread on this board where it was discussed. Your points about hardware acceleration are of course more important, if all other things are equal. I was merely saying that there are more factors at play.

Dempsey, if you switch off the sound in a game, and the fps goes up greatly, then a better soundcard would probably make a difference, but you haven't stated how old the machine is, or what games you play. See also can you try an sblive from a friends machine before buying a new card.

Inspector Gadget

Originally posted by dempseyt
Well on the directx diagnostic it says that the sound is software accelerated, that would suggest that the CPU has to fiddle with the sound somewhat, but how much? Would it be noticable, say playing games?

The short answer to this is: you won't know until you try. It all depends on how many of these features the game actually uses; not every game actually uses things such as positional audio (there's no point in a game such as the Warcraft series, for example), and any given game may (for example) try to mix more channels than the card supports in hardware, leading to some being mixed in software, etc. etc., so you'll have to "suck it and see" for the games you actually play...

Gadget

Dempsey

My bad, Dell P2 233Mhz, 192 P66 RAM, 32Mb Geforce 2 MX200, Yamaha On-board sound. The reason why I bought up the audigy is if I buy one I can throw the sb live! card into the old one but i was curious to see was i wasting money.

The games typically would be counter-strike, day of defeat, firearms, half-life mods and any good old game that is good in network play to run on the old PC. They run ok but i want to squeeze everything out of her. I don't have the finances to buy a new mobo and CPU, case ,psu, ram..........

The on board sound spec is:
Audio chip set: Yamaha OPL3-SA3 Enhanced 3D Audio controller, a single-chip audio system that integrates OPL3 and its DAC, a 16-bit Sigma-delta CODEC, MPU401 MIDI interface, and joystick with timer
Wave-table MIDI chip: Integrated Yamaha OPL4-ML2 chip