• xan1242@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    2
    ·
    1 year ago

    Are you serious?

    Now you got me wondering why this is the case…

    I wonder if it’s just the drivers. Or something else, like the audio device name, or APOs.

    Which game in particular did you have in mind?

    • Granixo
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      I suspect it mainly has to do with the fact that Windows usually outputs uncompressed audio (due to requiring extra licencing for codecs like Dolby on a general-purpose PC, unlike consoles).

      Because of that, a dedicated sound card will take that weight off the CPU.

      In my case in particular, i noticed an 5-8FPS increase when playing AC:Revelations with my dedicated sound card (bear in mind, my CPU is merely a Core 2 Duo), but that’s because i still don’t have the money to upgrade my whole rig.

      Back on topic, i saw a video by Anton’s Hardware that made a deep research on the topic, and while the conclusion was that, yes, on current games & hardware it didin’t make up much of a difference, it could be useful for specific cases, (in some poorly optimized games you can get better frames, and in well-optimized games can push FPS a bit further.

      To finally end my comment, i’ll add a link to the video i just mentioned, along with one of the comments that i think demonstrates a “best case scenario” for the use of a sound card in current gaming.

      https://youtu.be/aFy9jZzDSnY

      • xan1242@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        1 year ago

        This is an interesting watch.

        Thanks for sharing!

        I used to use sound cards myself ages ago for MIDI and DirectSound acceleration. I didn’t expect the hardware audio codecs to actually make a difference.

        Nothing is stopping me from installing a PCIe Sound Blaster with a good old EMU chip. At least I hope so, the EMU10k1 and 20k1 have a hardware DMA bug which breaks them on systems with more than 2GB of memory lol

        Not sure if I should go the CMedia route and just use Xonar instead. I do like Creative’s features (especially ALchemy), but those you can gain on any machine using a software suite made by Creative themselves.

        • Granixo
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          2
          ·
          1 year ago

          As the video i linked demonstrates, Asus cards are slower than Creative cards, so i recommend Creative.

          That being said, choose whatever you feel comfortable with. :)