Tech-Hounds.com

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.

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