Try to play Dragon Age with audio disabled entirely to see if your current audio solution is holding you back in performance. (personal opinion here) If so first look at a Creative X-Fi Titanium for use with speakers or look for a card like the Auzentech X-Fi HomeTheater HD if you need good headphone support, HDMI or other features.
If you have more time than this read the executive summary of each section below. If you need more information on a specific subject, read that entire section. If you still need more information use google to find reviews or background articles, or post a message below. I am not an expert in this field, so please contribute if you can and please share your experiences if you have changed your sound card and noticed performance or quality changes when playing Dragon Age by doing so.
Why a sound card matters for performance
Executive summary: many different audio sources in a 3D environmental audio setting require much processing. A sound card that can do this processing for you saves the main processor much time, so it can make your game run smoother.
Dragon Age has many types of audio coming together.
- Background music
- Character speech during cut-scenes, party banter and some shouts in or directly after battle
- Sound effects like the impact sounds of weapons, sound of fire burning, sound of a waterfall
This can mean quite a few distinct sounds are active at the same time, for instance the background music is playing while you are fighting next to a waterfall, an axe hits an opponent and Alistair shouts 'I think we work well together'. Your sound card will have to output all these sound together at the right time. Also, when using a surround speaker setup, the audio has to be positioned, e.g. you can actually hear the waterfall behind you when you are facing away from it. Finally, when you are in a special room like a dungeon, the game will apply an echo and some distortion effects to all the audio so you really seem to be in the special room and not for example outdoors. Finally the audio might be sent to your speaker by an analog connection or perhaps using something like DTS Connect, which means the computer has to encode the sound into the DTS format before passing it along to your speaker set or receiver.
All stages above require processing either from your normal processor (CPU) or the sound card if it provides hardware acceleration. All sound in Windows generally uses the DirectSound or OpenAL sound libraries. Some sound card drivers will handle almost all DirectSound and OpenAL functionality by passing commands along to a processing chip specially made for this purpose. If the sound card can do it with its own processor, your normal processor (CPU) has more time available for other tasks, helping you get a smoother gaming experience.
Hardware acceleration for gaming and 3D sound
Executive summary: not all audio chips and sound cards that claim hardware acceleration will actually accelerate much of your game audio.
This is where some dedicated sound cards make a difference when compared to the audio chip found on most motherboards. Sound cards like the Creative X-Fi Titanium or the Auzentech HD Theater can do many of these tasks using their own processing power and memory. Many other cards are available that accelerate 3D sound, but note that some sound chips claiming hardware acceleration from vendors like Realtek and C-Media will not really hardware accelerate much at all, despite technologies with flashy names like 3D SoundBack and Xear3D EX. This is not black- and white, C-Media does make some really great chips that can properly hardware accelerate 3D sound like the CMI8788 chip, but these are rarely if at all found only on high-end mainboards. Also, older generation sound cards will hardware accelerate much less than you might think, a good example of this is the Creative Audigy which has far less processing power than the newer X-Fi series.
Buy good chips that do what you want, not vendor naming schemes
Executive summary: the sound card market is just like the video card market, with confusing and sometimes misleading product names. Do not fall for these schemes and get the performance you need.
Then you have the naming schemes, just like with video cards. Some sound cards might have a name that makes you think that they will help you with hardware acceleration, while in fact they do not or only very little. A good example of this is the Creative X-Fi extreme audio, which actually uses the same chip as the Audigy series and thus should really never have been named as an X-Fi in the first place. Just like with video cards, higher model numbers or even model names might be confusing or downright misleading, so always check the specifications before you purchase. If you want hardware acceleration you are for example not shopping for a sound card with the X-Fi name, but for a sound card with an actual X-Fi chip. Maybe you even want to go all technical on the sales people and ask for a sound card with the latest X-Fi EMU20K2 processor instead of the earlier X-Fi EMU20K1 model, that should be fun
.Will it make a difference in your case
Executive summary: test with audio off to see if audio processing is costing you game performance.
If you are currently using the default audio chip on your motherboard or an older/cheaper add-in soundcard with limited or no 3D sound acceleration and want to know if you would benefit from buying a special sound card without spending the money, simply disable audio entirely (through the launchers configuration settings). If this makes a large difference in performance, you will very likely benefit from a (better) add-in sound card. For reference see the links below, any suggestions are welcome and will be added to this post when I have the time.
http://en.wikipedia....nd_Blaster_X-Fi
http://en.wikipedia....Fi_(audio_chip)
http://en.wikipedia....iki/DirectSound
Shortlist of recommended sound cards
Executive summary and personal opinion: if you are on a budget and only use speakers first look at the Creative X-Fi Titanium. With a big budget, need for a decent headphone amplifier, home entertainment needs like HDMI and other features take a look at the Auzentech X-Fi HomeTheater HD.
Creative X-Fi Titanium series (at this time all of them have the X-Fi EMU20K2 processor)
Auzentech X-Fi Forte or Auzentech X-Fi HomeTheater HD
Asus Xonar D2X
HT Omega Claro or HT Omega Claro Plus (EAX support only 2.0, more entertainment than gamer card)
The cheapest card in this list would be the Creative X-Fi Titanium at about $ 80 or € 70. Its analog output is not stellar and it will not hardware accelerate DTS encoding, but it will outperform common on-board audio chips by a fair margin both on audio quality and hardware acceleration. For the higher priced models, I advise you to look at reviews and pick the card that has the features you need or quality you want.
Benchmarks
There are not many benchmark results to be found for hardware acceleration capabilities. The links below should give you some information though.
http://www.guru3d.co...ndcard-review/9
http://www.elitebast...27&limitstart=3
Audio quality nonsense and the bigger numbers game
Executive summary: With audio quality the chain is as weak as its weakest link, which is often the amplifier, sometimes the speakers, but almost never an add-in sound card. Invest money in the amplifier before getting an expensive sound card (or if you use headphones only, buy the sound card with the best headphone amplifier).
One last tip: do not look at signal to noise ratios or specifications like that too much, as 100dB signal to noise (SNR) ratio is the difference between a very calm room and a vuvuzela playing at 1m from your ear. With a gaming computer running, you would need to have audio playing at hearing damage levels to even get noise levels from your speakers over your computer noise. Likely your amplifier and speakers cannot handle such levels without adding much distortion. So if you ask me and Wikipedia, your best bet is to invest in good speakers and a decent amplifier, before even looking at signal to noise ratios. Different sound cards might produce slightly different sound due to sound coloring (e.g. warmer sound or adding more bass), but never will you be able to distinguish 100dB signal to noise ratio from 120dB with everything else being equal. Let me sum up some of my Harman Kardon AVR 130 surround receiver specifications against the cheapest X-Fi Titanium to illustrate this. Note that the AVR-130 has been quoted by several sources as having great specifications and sound quality at an affordable price of $ 400 (back in 2004), speakers not included. Any computer speaker sets will perform significantly worse.
Signal to noise ratio (SNR): (AVR-130: 95dB, X-Fi: 109dB)
Total harmonic distortion (THD): (AVR-130: < 0.07%, X-Fi: 0.001%)
In other words, the core of the X-Fi card produces far better sound quality than my and for that matter any real amplifier out there when it comes to the normal line outputs. If you want to plug your headphones directly into your sound card the story is very much different however. The X-Fi headphone amplifiers are not high grade at all and come nowhere near the line-out specifications. If you want good quality audio on your headphones, be sure to check reviews that include the headphone output quality as this is almost never specified by the vendor. Also, you could look at an external headphone amplifier, which you could then keep using with future sound cards as well.
http://en.wikipedia...._pressure_level
Modifié par basdoorn, 08 août 2010 - 01:35 .
Retour en haut
