5.1 sound in games - does it make game slower?

[djkemp1]

hello, i have onboard 5.1 sound with my Asus motherboard which has a soundmax chip.

i have been running a few games on the 5.1 setting. but what i wanted to know is, will this make the game run slower e.g. fps lower etc than if i run it in normal 2 speaker mode??

hope you can help

[optimus_prime]

well can't you just test it? :)

anyway, theoretically yes, on-board sound can steal some processor resources and more if you go multichannel or eax. will it noticeably hurt performance in game depends on how much resources that game already consumes. aka depends on your other hardware. meaning, if you think on upgrading sound-card just to boost your fps don't waste your money, buy vga or faster cpu.

[djkemp1]

i have been playing bioshock, which is a good game btw.

it hasn't got eax enabled just 5.1 sound. so you think that it wouldn't hurt performance a great deal?

[MultiForce]

When I bought my X-FI card I was gaining about 10 FPS in BF2 even though I have a pretty up to date comp. Not all games uses the HW as good as they should so it's not a big difference in all the games. BF2 and BF2142 and a couple of other games got a "special" setting just for X-FI cards that really makes the game sound much better.

One more thing is that many games allows you to get more sounds and sound effects @ the same time, and even sound effects that you don't get with "cheap" on-board cards. You save a great deal of CPU time and RAM too.

If you buy such a card and you play your favorite MP3 file one time you will never go back to on board audio.

****** END OF COMMERCIAL ******

[lynx]

What Multiforce says is basically true, but not necessarily for the right reasons.

Many on-board audio chips are simply codecs. That is, they create the audio waveforms from data provided and it is the cpu that has to convert the input source to the data stream.

More sophisticated devices have an audio processor which will do some or all of the conversion for you, relieving the cpu of that load.

Almost all audio cards will do the basic conversion and many will do much more. Having that facility on the motherboard is fairly rare, but not unknown. Without knowing exactly which mobo you've got I can't tell you if yours is just a codec or a proper audio processor.

If yours is just a codec then even a cheap add-in card could give you benefits in terms of performance, though the quality of the output may suffer if you go for one of the rock bottom options.

[djkemp1]

i have an Asus P5B motherboard, anyone know if this is just a codec that uses cpu or whether it has an audio processor?

[MultiForce]

i have an Asus P5B motherboard, anyone know if this is just a codec that uses cpu or whether it has an audio processor?

"The audio section from this motherboard provides 7.1 audio, produced by the south bridge chip with the aid of an Analog Devices AD1988A codec. This codec provides a better signal-to-noise ratio for its inputs compared to Gigabyte GA-965P-DS3 and MSI P965 Platinum – 90 dB against 85 dB. The signal-to-noise ratio for its output is of 95 dB and it supports up to 192 KHz sampling rate for its inputs and outputs (the one used by the two abovementioned boards from MSI and Gigabyte support 192 KHz only for their outputs, with their inputs limited to 96 KHz)."


http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/article/408

[djkemp1]

thanks for this, so does that mean it uses the cpu to process the sound or would it have its own audio processor?

[ilya]

i encountered this question myself also but was not sure if it's really reasonable... thanks for the info

[djkemp1]

if whats reasonable?

[MultiForce]

It uses the CPU to process sound as they just put in the south bridge chip to get rid of some noise interference with the MB.

[lynx]

It is purely a codec.

If you look at Analog Devices page for this product, here (http://www.analog.com/en/prod/0,2877,AD1988A,00.html), you will see it is a codec.

It is difficult to tell if AD make an Audio processor for computers, if they do it would come under the heading Audio Signal Processor, which you will find separately in the table of contents on the left.

[djkemp1]

thank you for the info, so would it make a huge difference then do you think running games as i am with 5.1 sound? or is it hardly noticeable?

[zzzMonster]

Not all onboards are codecs - at least I think nvidia soundstorm is not only a codec

[djkemp1]

the one i have by the sounds of it is, but would this hinder performance a lot, or is it barely noticeable?

[optimus_prime]

man, i told you on the first post :)
to make valuable claim about that one, one would have to have specs of game you're playing and your whole hardware.
it's much more easier for you to turn off 5.1, try game then turn it on, try game again and conclude if it indeed does or does not affect performance on your machine.
that's much more reasonable than asking people on forum to guess :)

[lynx]

Replacing an on board codec with an add-on audio processor will give you benefits no matter whether you are using 2 channel or 5.1. Typical problems are jerkiness and freezing. Obviously, the more you ask of your processor the worse the problem becomes.

However, this may be less of a problem with dual core processors, I can't give a definitive answer because I haven't tried dual core with just an audio codec.

As was said some time back, can't you just try it? It only takes seconds to change back if the performance is unacceptable.

Getting an EAX capable sound card would certainly make a difference though.