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.
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