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.
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