It’s time to boom, boom, shake, shake the room with Atomic’s resident music maestro, Bennett Ring. And he’s got a few shocking surprises in store for the EAX lovers of the world.
When discussing the components of the PC which affect frame rates, the most commonly talked about bits are the CPU, video card and memory. However, and it's a little known fact, the sound card can have a profound effect on the overall chuginess of your games, especially when you start enabling echoey cool stuff like EAX. With the recent release of 3DMark2003 and its sound benchmark, we thought it might be a great time to take a look at the more popular sound cards available. This benchmark runs the Wings of Fury scene from the graphics test of 3DMark2003, first with zero sound, then with 24 different sound sources, and finally with an ear splitting 60 sounds – not that many of today's sound cards can actually run 60 sounds in hardware at one time, but anyway.
Unfortunately it doesn't include EAX support; we've been scouring for a decent EAX benchmark ever since the Soundblaster Live! brought the joy of EAX to our ears. More observant gamers noticed that EAX could bring frame rates plummeting down, so you can imagine our joy when Creative finally told us of a benchmarking application that uses full EAX. Dungeon Siege no less. This little pearler has been gathering dust in our benchmarking shelf for around a year, but it's only now that we have discovered that it is a great EAX benchmark. Unfortunately it only supports EAX version 1, but it's still a great application for showing how well a given soundcard supports the most popular set of sound special effects. We also used ye olde faithful Audio Bench's DirectSound benchmark.
We selected the most stressful test from this benchmark, the 44.1khz 32 voice 16-bit streaming test, which reports how much of your CPU is getting chewed while the benchmark is running. Obviously the lower the percentage reported, the better. Sound quality tests were probably the easiest part of the testing. After chatting to several sound engineers about which gadget we'd need to steal to accurately measure the sound quality of each card, they convinced us that listening tests were the best way to do it.
Numbers are one thing, but at the end of the day it's all about how good it sounds to human ears. And after listening to all of these cards, it soon became crystal clear as to which offered the highest fidelity audio.
The tests were conducted on a P4 2.4GHz, i845PE, Ti4800 system, to limit bottlenecking in other areas of the system. Windows XP with DX9 was our OS of choice.
So, let's see which of today's sound cards offer the best performance and sound quality for your PC. We've ranked them from worst to best, making it simple to choose the right card for your needs. You might be surprised to see just how much of a difference a fast sound card can make to the smoothness of your gameplay.
Terratec DMX 6fireWebsite: Terratec www.terratec.com Supplier: Major Music www.majormusic.com.auPrice: $699
The only alternative to the Audigy series that offers 24bit/96khz sound, the 6fire stands out for having brilliant sound quality. Unfortunately, it also stands out as having by far the most problems with our benchmarks. It simply refused to run on 3DMark2003, didn't support EAX in Dungeon Siege, but thankfully we did manage to get it to complete the Audio Bench benchmark. It might have been better for Terratec if it didn't, as it scored the worst performance of the lot, devouring a massive 13% of the CPU's resources. This is obviously not a great sound card for gamers, due to its compatibility issues and high CPU cycle suckage, which is a pity considering how nice it sounds. However, thanks to its brilliant sound quality and exhaustive I/O connections mounted on a separate I/O box (head to www.terratec.com for the comprehensive list of I/O options) it's not a bad choice for creative musician types.
Hercules Digifire 7.1Website: Hercules www.hercules.comSupplier: Hercules www.hercules.comPrice: $190
How on earth anyone can fit a 7.1 speaker system around their PC is beyond us, but for those who somehow manage this work of audio wizardry, the Digifire 7.1 is one of the few sound cards that support a speaker stockpile of this size. The inclusion of two FireWire ports is pretty nifty, as is the optical S/PDIF output, but these features aren't exactly revolutionary anymore.Sadly the sound quality of this card is lacking, being measurably inferior to the better performers. It seemed fine at first, until we fired up the 24/96 cards and were promptly blown away by the crispness of their audio. Its performance in 3DMark2003 was one of the fastest at 24 voices (sound sources), but it could not support 60 voices in hardware. This speedy performance wasn't matched in the EAX tests, recording substantially slower frame rates than its competitors – almost 25% slower in fact. Who'd have thought that a sound card could slow down your frame rates by a quarter? This low performance was backed up by its hefty CPU utilisation of 10%, proving that it's not the best card for the frame rate deprived. About the only thing this card has going for it is its reasonable price and 7.1 speaker support, which probably won't appeal to most Atomicans.
Hercules Gamesurround Fortissimo III 7.1Website: Hercules www.hercules.comSupplier: Hercules www.hercules.comPrice: $130
There isn't a lot of difference between this sound card and its Hercules stablemate, the Digifire 7.1. Both support 7.1 speaker setups, as you've probably already guessed from the product name. Both have lower sound quality than the 24/96 sound cards, albeit at a much more affordable price than the uber high end sound cards. Like its brethren, this card could not complete the 60 voice test in 3DMark2003 but did very well in the 24 voice test. Strangely this excellent performance failed to carry over to any of the other benchmarks – just like its bro. In fact, this card performed almost identically to the Digifire 7.1 in all of the benchmarks. It had the second slowest EAX frame rate, and also chewed up almost 9% of the CPU resources during the Audio Bench tests. A closer look at both cards reveals the reason why – they're both based around the Cirrus Logic SoundFusion Cirrus Logic CS4624 DSP. It's obvious to us that this DSP simply doesn't have the oomph to compete against the beefier competition. Unfortunately for Hercules, we can't recommend this card to those who demand the ultimate in performance and sound quality.
Videologic SonicExplosion DVDWebsite: VideoLogic www.videologic.c
Issue: 137 | June, 2012