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Gamer's Audio - Part 2

Add on and Integrated sound solutions
Cards Creative Live! 24 bit, Audigy 2 Value and Audigy 2 ZS
Add on and Integrated

In the first part of this article, we examine different solutions from manufacturers of integrated / onboard sound, particularly how they behave when used for gaming. Its no surprise that Creative's Live! 24 bit provides such a strong offering over the AC 97 Codec from Realtek or NVIDIA's Sonata audio controller. After all, Creative is the only serious players in the gaming sound card business. Today, we putting the onboard Live! to the test and compare it to Creative's own add-on solution - the Audigy 2 Value and Audigy 2 ZS.

Overview

Since this article focuses on gaming, we won't go much into features and add-ons of the cards. As far as gaming go, the Live! 24 bit, Audigy 2 Value and Audigy 2 ZS is pretty similar. Below is a comparison table (from the website) of Creative's add-on cards (excluding X-Fi)

	Live! 24 bit	Audigy 2 Value	Audigy 2 ZS	Audigy 2 ZS Platinum	Audigy 2 ZS Platinum Pro	Audigy 4 Pro
EAX	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
EAX Advanced HD	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
EAX 4 Advanced HD	N/a	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
EAX hardware acceleration	N/a	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Audio Environments Processed Simultaneously	1	>1	>1	>1	>1	>1
Maximum Number of 3D voices	64	64	64	64	64	64
Max Channels in 3D Positional Audio	7.1	7.1	7.1	7.1	7.1	7.1

One interesting thing to note about the Live! 24 bit that's not in the table above - you can use the latest drivers without having to install the bundled drivers first! So, if you are unfortunate enough to lost the original CDs, you don't have to get another one. Things can't be greater than this, but you're wrong. The current Live! 24 bit and Audigy LS drivers are unified Windows drivers - that means you can use them on both Windows XP and Windows XP x64! Audigy 2 Value and Audigy 2 ZS users don't have that luxury. This 'problem' has been the cause of much heartbreak for Audigy 2 users. Hopefully Creative will apply the same policy as they did for the Live! 24 bit to Audigy 2 drivers (and X-Fi as well)!

Features

Traditionally, Creative's products are only available as add-on cards. Even their previous effort of onboard solutions differs a lot from their add-on cards. However, Creative's Live! 24 bit onboard sounds retains much of the features and performance of their famous add-on sound cards such as the Audigy and Audigy 2. You can see differences in hardware features such as the lack of SPDIF input and output on Live! 24 bit add-on cards, though it is present (somewhat) in Audigy 2 Value and Audigy 2 ZS. The ZS even comes with a game port and Firewire port, most probably for better integration with Creative's portable MP3 players. However, the onboard Live! 24 bit does come with both SPDIF input and output (if the manufacturer chose to include them) and most motherboards come with both USB and Firewire as standard equipment these days.

The Live! 24 bit doesn't come with DVD Audio support out of the box like the Audigy 2 Value and Audigy 2 ZS. However, there's hope - you can use Intervideo's WinDVD for both DVD and DVD Audio playback. You can maintain the great quality of DVD Audio content since all these cards support 24 bit, 96 kHz output. However, the Audigy 2 cards also have support for 24 bit, 192 kHz (stereo) output which the Live! 24 bit lacks.

There is one major difference which users, particularly gamers, want to consider: the Live! 24 bit lacks EAX 4 Advanced HD support, which is available on both Audigy 2 Value and Audigy 2 ZS. However, games using EAX 4 are very few, most are either using EAX 2 or EAX 3 (EAX Advanced HD). Only several of the latest games use EAX 4 Advanced HD and from what we can tell (or more appropriately, hear), there's virtually no difference both in performance and experience compared to EAX 3.

With these differences in mind, its no wonder that the motherboards with onboard Creative Live! 24 bit is so appealing (at least to gamers). You get most of the features of more expensive solutions at a fraction of the cost. The MSI K8N SLI Platinum we used for testing cost around USD 120, while the Audigy 2 Value cost around USD 50 and the Audigy 2 ZS around USD 90. You can get the Live! 24 bit as add on for around USD 30, but remember you don't get the SPDIF input / output.

Of course, gamers are less concerned with features and more with performance and gaming experience. Rest assured, the Live! 24 bit both onboard and add-on card has the same or at least nearly identical sound output quality with their Live! And Audigy 2 add-on sound cards. So, we can concentrate on performance and see just how the cards match up.

Performance

While most gamers appreciate an immersive audio experience, most still favor a higher frame rate. If a game suffers lag and frame rate drops with EAX, most gamers will probably turn them off. We ran test with both EAX enabled and disabled (through the game's menu options) to see whether or not such a drop occurred. Since there are games supporting more than one version of EAX, additional test are also ran under each EAX version. The results between using EAX, EAX 2 and EAX 3 is very small and not noticeable (around 1 fps or even smaller). Sound wise, you can hardly tell the difference between each version.

Our test setup
AMD Athlon 64 3000+ socket 939
2 x 256 MB Kingston KVR 3-3-3 PC3200 DDR-SDRAM
MSI K8N SLI Platinum Socket 939 PCI Express motherboard
ASUS EAX X700 Pro 256 MB graphics card
Maxtor DiamondMaxPlus9 80 GBs Serial ATA 8 MB buffer
ASUS E-616 DVD-ROM
450 watts ATX power supply

Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2 installed
ATI Catalyst 5.8 reference driver
NVIDIA NForce 4 6.66 reference driver
Creative SoundBlaster Live! 24 bit 5.12.1.512 driver.
Creative SoundBlaster Audigy 2 Value 5.12.1.522 driver.
Creative SoundBlaster Audigy 2 ZS 5.12.2.444 driver.
DirectX 9.0c
all respected games used for benchmarks have been updated to their latest, final builds

The results:

With EAX enabled, the Live! 24 bit is 2 fps slower than the Audigy 2 Value and Audigy 2 ZS. Hardly noticeable, let alone significant since we're getting average frame rates over 100 fps. The same difference can also be seen when EAX is enabled. Interesting to note, the Live! 24 bit has a higher maximum fps than both Audigy cards. Its quite probable that the nature of the Live! 24 bit as an onboard solution allows it to communicate faster with the rest of the system.


The most obvious thing we can see in this game is that the onboard Live! 24 bit is actually achieving higher frame rates than both the Audigy sound cards. The difference is significant with every version of EAX (around 10 fps out of 100 fps). In fact, the performance levels of both Audigy sound cards are at par to NForce Sonata and ALC 850. It seems like the Audigy cards are holding back the system. Since the Audigy 2 Value and Live! 24 bit has a similar chip, there's only one explanation - the onboard Live! 24 bit is getting data much faster from the rest of the system than the cards.



This game is quite system limited, so it's no wonder there's little difference between the cards. Again we see the two Audigy cards are slightly faster, but with no noticeable differences (2 to 4 fps at most). So, it looks like in most cases the performance difference between the Live! 24 bit and the Audigy cards is around 2 fps, but we need more test before making our conclusion.


This game doesn't rely on EAX but DirectSound. The only option available in the sound options are the number of voices and volume levels. So, here we can see what how 'run of the mill' games will behave on all these cards. While there are differences, the performance of the Live! 24 and both Audigy cards is identical (only within 1 fps of each other), regardless of whether you use 16 or 32 hardware channels in this game. Funny how the Audigy 2 Value is faster than the ZS, but that's probably nothing.


Unlike F1 Career Challenge, sounds in Nascar 2003 is ever present. Nascar also has an option to utilize 3D sound, so we tested both at default settings (2D audio, 12 channels) and highest quality settings (3D audio, 24 channels). So, we're seeing a slightly different picture with this game. The Live! 24 bit is around 5 to 6 fps slower (10 percent) than both Audigy cards when pushing 24 hardware channels in 3D. Looks like we've finally found the Live! 24 bit's Achilles heel.


This game is the only one in our test that supports EAX 4 Advanced HD. We did some test using EAX 4 Advanced HD and found no difference in performance and sound output. This just proves that using a higher version of EAX doesn't automatically provide better performance or gaming experience. Performance under default and highest quality sound setting is virtually the same on Live! 24 bit, Audigy 2 Value and Audigy 2 ZS.

Conclusion:

From the looks of things, it seems that the Live! 24 bit offers solid performance, even when compared to add-on cards such as the Audigy 2 Value and Audigy 2 ZS. If you're using the add-on version, you probably will only get 2 fps lower in most games. The onboard version comes with a bit of a bonus - faster transfer rate with other parts of the system. As you can see, this can help frame rates, particularly in games which are not system limited.

For the budget conscious gamer, add-on cards may seem like a luxury but not for serious gamers who really want the best. Well, now with the onboard Live! 24 bit, even the budget conscious gamer can now enjoy much of the features and performance of more expensive add-on sound cards, without sacrificing sound quality - at least when gaming is concerned. If you're a serious gamer, you might want to reconsider your decision before buying an add-on sound card, particularly Creative's Audigy 2 series. It might be better to jump to X-Fi instead (but that's another article).

It's quite interesting to see that the onboard solution offer more performance, we noted earlier that this is probably because it can communicate faster with the other parts of the system (processor, hard drive). If this is really the case, perhaps Creative (and other sound card manufacturers) have to consider offering a PCI Express solution as well.

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