Gamer's Audio
Integrated sound solutionsChipset ALC 850, NVIDIA APU and Creative Live! 24 bit
Integrated
Unlike motherboards and graphics cards, sound peripherals, whether integrated or as an add-on, rarely gets the same attention from users, gamers and reviewers. Most average users are content with the quality and performance of onboard solutions, while the more quality conscious audio enthusiast prefer to use professional or at least prosumer solutions. For most gamers, Creative's line of sound cards is the only option - they offer features, performance and compatibility that matters most to them - in games. In fact, Creative is the only sound card manufacturer that caters to gamers interest.
NVIDIA made some waves with their NForce chipset, particularly in respect to audio. Their SoundStorm audio, which is also used in the Xbox (though it is more extensive on the console), is the first serious competitor to Creative's dominance. Unfortunately, SoundStorm has now been abandoned in favor of other features so this technology is not present in NForce 3 and NForce 4. Right now, most motherboards and chipset depends on AC 97 codec for integrated audio, usually in the form of Realtek's ALC 850 codec. Intel made some progress in audio by offering their High Definition Audio, but these are only available on Intel chipsets and their features do not emphasize gaming performance.
While these codecs do a quite competent job of offering surround audio for music and movies, they are not very good for gaming. Most games will default to DirectSound or Miles Fast 2D Positional Audio if you're using onboard audio solutions. They do offer up to EAX 2 support, but their quality is less than stellar. With slow processors, frame rates may also suffer, making it useless to enabled EAX in games with these codecs. So, it was a pleasant surprise for us when Creative announced that their SoundBlaster Live! 24 bit solutions will be available as both an add-on solution and integrated audio. The Live! 24 bit shares many features found on Creative's add-on cards such as support for 24 bit, 96 kHz surround audio and more importantly to gamers, EAX Advanced HD support.
Last week, we've completed a round up and comparison of socket 939 motherboards. The MSI K8N SLI Platinum is one of the first boards to offer Creative's Live! 24 bit as integrated audio. In fact, it is this very reason that made us recommend this motherboard. However, we didn't have time to really examine it. Today, we're going to see just how much better the Creative Live! 24 bit is to the competition - the ALC 850 codec and NVIDIA NForce 4 Sonata audio controller.
The NForce 4 does feature an audio controller, so you could install the NForce 4 reference audio driver or the codec's drivers (don't install them both). We perform testing with both drivers, just to see whether there is a difference in both quality and performance. After all, on motherboards that does not feature an audio controller, you have to rely on the codec's drivers.
Overview
Real 3D sound
The most obvious difference between ALC8 50, Sonata and Live! 24 bit is of course 24 bit, 96 kHz audio. This will let you listen to 24 bit, 96 kHz recording without any quality compromise. Of course, you do have to use a high resolution source such as DVD Audio to get that quality. MP3 and audio CD will sound pretty much the same on the ALC 850 and Sonata as on the Live! 24 bit. The Live! 24 bit features a Dolby Digital EX decoder, which is nice for watching DVDs, but most software players also come with a software Dolby Digital EX decoder so it's not really that important. While 24 bit, 96 kHz audio is nice to have, most gamers placed more value on correct, true 3D sound in games.
Sound Test
Since Creative pretty much defined the EAX standard,
its not surprising their cards and chips have the best EAX
support. We chose two games to highlight this fact: Call of
Duty and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. If you
remember, Call of Duty developers, Infinity Ward, is made
up of developers who brought us Medal of Honor: Allied
Assault. The game earned them an award for best sound.
Naturally, the same quality is also present in Call of
Duty. SW: KOTOR from Bioware is also one of the games
applauded for its sound and music. Both games feature
support up to EAX 3 and made use of them quite extensively.
The current standard is EAX 5, but even now there are only
a handful of games making use of EAX 4.For sound testing, we played back a replay of the Dawnville demo in Call of Duty and record the sounds in real time (not timedemo). In SW: KOTOR, we chose a battle sequence between the Republic and Sith soldiers on the Endar Spire, one of the first cinematic sequence in the game. We used FRAPS for both, recording the sounds into an uncompressed 44 kHz 16 bit WAV file. The Creative Live! 24 bit has a lower volume level for recording, so the volume levels were adjusted to match the sound levels of NVIDIA Sonata and ALC 850.
Below, you can see the three recordings loaded inside a sound editor with Sonata on top, Live! 24 bit on the middle and ALC 850 on the bottom. Click on the images to see the full screenshot. What's interesting is the fact that on some parts, there are differences between Live! 24 bit's left and right sound output, where the Sonata's and ALC 850's left and right output are pretty much the same. This is more pronounced in Call of Duty than in SW: KOTOR. This can be considered an indication that the Live! 24 bit has better sound and effects positioning compared to Sonata and ALC 850.
COD
SW: KOTOR
Of course, there's no substitute to actually listening to the record and actual replay / cinematic sequence. You can download the recordings we've made below. For practical reasons, we've compressed them to 44 kHz, 16 bit, 128 Kbps MP3 files:
COD
Sonata
Live! 24 bit
ALC 850
SW: KOTOR
Sonata
Live! 24 bit
ALC 850
We can assure you that what you're hearing in the recordings is pretty much what you will be hearing during gameplay. The ALC850 is the more distinctive of the three, applying reverb pretty much everywhere and to everything. The Live! 24 bit sounds a bit muffled but has the greatest positioning. Sonata's output was a bit crispier and of course louder than Live! 24 bit's. It offers good positioning and lacks the reverb of ALC 850's output, but some sounds are still 'lost' during heavy firing - the footsteps and grenade throw near the end of the demo.
On SW: KOTOR, the same reverb effect is present on ALC 850. The Sonata's output is again crispier, louder than Live! 24 bit. On the other hand, the Live! 24 bit has the more pronounced positioning, but it 'lacks' explosion rumbles near the end.
Quality is subjective, but you probably don't want to use EAX if you're using AC97 codec drivers. NVIDIA Sonata offers the best compromise, offering good positioning and overall sound effects. So, if you want quality gaming audio, use the reference sound drivers from NVIDIA instead of the default codec drivers. Those using chipsets other than NVIDIA may not have that choice, so either stuck to using DirectSound or Miles Fast 2D Positional Audio or at least get a Live! 24 bit sound card.
Performance
While most gamers appreciate an immersive audio experience, most still appreciate a higher frame rate. If a game suffers lag and frame rate drops with EAX, it would be better to turn them completely off. So, we perform testing with both EAX turned on and off. Most games also have several levels of EAX support (EAX, EAX 2 and EAX 3), that's why we also perform test under each EAX support levels. The ALC850 and Sonata supports up to EAX 2.0, while Live! 24 supports up to EAX Advanced HD. Of course, some games don't even use EAX. We also perform test with games using DirectSound, both with 12 / 16 sound channels and the maximum sound channels supported (either 24 or 32). The ALC and Sonata supports up to 48 sound channels while the Live! 24 bit supports up to 64 sound channels. We used two motherboards for testing, the MSI K8N SLI Platinum with Live! 24 bit and ABIT AN8 Ultra with NForce 4 Sonata (with NVIDIA audio drivers and ALC850 drivers).Our test setup
AMD Athlon 64 3000+ socket 939
2 x 256 MB Kingston KVR 3-3-3 PC3200 DDR-SDRAM
ASUS EAX X700 Pro 256 MB
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
Realtek ALC 850 Driver WDM 5.820 (motherboard supplied driver)
Creative SoundBlaster Live! 24 bit 5.12.1.353 driver (motherboard supplied driver).
DirectX 9.0c
all respected games used for benchmarks have been updated to their latest, final builds.
The results:
Remember, that we're using different motherboards so this may have an impact in performance, though we doubt it. If you remember, the AN8 Ultra was a bit quicker than the K8N SLI Platinum, but this time under the same settings (DRAM Command Rate 1T), the K8N SLI Platinum with Live! 24 bit sizzles past the AN8 Ultra with Sonata drivers. Even with EAX, the Live! 24 bit is still noticeably faster.
Any doubt you might have about the difference between ALC850, Sonata, and Live! 24 bit performance should disappear once you looked at Call of Duty test results. The Live! 24 bit is noticeably faster than the others with EAX enabled. This confirm the Dungeon Siege results - the Live! 24 bit can be up to 10 to 15 percent faster than ALC850 or Sonata with EAX. It's a shame that even Live! 24 bit still lost significant frame rates with EAX enabled on this game.
In this game, we see little difference in results between ALC850, Sonata and Live! 24 bit, around 1 fps. Of course, scores doesn't tell the whole story, since only through listening we see that only the Sonata and Live! 24 bit provides the more immersive audio experience.
The Live! 24 is only 1 fps slower overall in this game, both with 16 and 32 sound channels utilized. Not surprising, since this game doesn't rely on EAX but instead on the basic DirectSound and DirectSound3D. With 1 fps difference from around 90 fps, the difference is hardly noticeable.
Unlike F1 Career Challenge, Nascar 2003 behaves differently. The Live! 24 bit is 10 percent faster here compared to Sonata without EAX, more if you compare it to ALC 850. With EAX, the Live! 24 bit drops slightly in performance to around the levels of Sonata without EAX, but the Sonata and ALC 850 also drops some frames. In the end, the Live! 24 bit is hands down noticeably faster in this game.
This game basically sounds and plays the same on ALC850, Sonata and Live! 24 bit. The Live! 24 bit is faster, but only by 1 fps, hardly noticeable. So, out of three games using DirectSound we tested, only Nascar 2003 is noticeably faster.
Conclusion:
It's not surprising that Creative's Live! 24 bit offer better support for EAX than ALC850 and Sonata by default. It is surprising that the performance difference can vary so much between hardly any to very noticeable, even significant. This performance difference alone is good news, but combined with great audio support and extra features, the Live! 24 bit should be considered the minimal sound solution for any serious gamer.Several weeks ago, Creative announced that the Live! 24 chip will be used by more manufacturers. This is good news for gamers, since they don't have to settle for slightly slower, less featured audio solutions anymore. Gamers looking for motherboards should really consider buying a motherboard equipped with Live! 24 bit, unless they're already have a Creative Live! or Audigy sound card / peripherals.
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