Soundcards an outdated concept?

Anyone have thoughts on Creative integrating their sound chips on motherboards :?: I thought I heard around CES 2007 time that they were doing putting X-Fi's on some motherboards.

Even if they got more profit per card for dedicated sound boards, why haven't they expanded to integrate them on some high-end motherboards? (kind of like the choice between Soundstorm and Soundstorm-less mobos).

I suppose the pricing would be somewhat tricky...
 
AlStrong said:
Anyone have thoughts on Creative integrating their sound chips on motherboards :?: I thought I heard around CES 2007 time that they were doing putting X-Fi's on some motherboards.

Even if they got more profit per card for dedicated sound boards, why haven't they expanded to integrate them on some high-end motherboards? (kind of like the choice between Soundstorm and Soundstorm-less mobos).

I suppose the pricing would be somewhat tricky...
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I think it would be the new cheapie XtremeAudio chip. It's sorta like the "Audigy" chips they were putting on mobos before; totally software-based. I think the quality is usually better than the usual Realtek / Soundmax stuff though.

They're putting that XtremeAudio chip into Express Card products too. Kind of a bummer after the Audigy 2 Notebook being almost a full Audigy 2 (minus hardware MIDI and firewire).

BTW, I have a friend who switched from Soundstorm thru optical to a Audigy 2 because in EQ2 he would get some horrible audio problems at times with the NV audio. And the drivers are ancient now, way older than Audigy drivers. So I don't think much of Soundstorm.
 
SugarCoat said:
Obviously you havent seen a game lose 15%+ performance from not having dedicated sound hardware. They're so cheap these days theres really no good excuse not to have one if you're a serious gamer.
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Well, I hear your point, but I think you missed mine... first of all I have an add-in card, but it's proaudio. Secondly, I have a well-overclocked Opteron 165. I haven't been CPU limited, to my knowledge, since before I got my first Athlon XP. Perhaps we play different games... perhaps SupCom pegs the CPU, but afaik it's the only one..?
 
I remember having this argument back when I bought my 7900GT-on-AGP card.

I remember the parts where onboard audio was somehow unequivocally slated as trash. Envy24PT and a 24bit/192khz DAC onboard doesn't matter? A soundfloor and SNR far better than the top-of-the-line (for the time) Audigy 2 warranted me changing?

I remember the parts where onboard audio slowed your PC down to a crawl. On a dated 2ghz A64 I see a best case argument is 10% increase using an offboard audio card... For the pricetag, I could've bought a better cooler and overclocked for the 10%. Or a better processor altogether.

I remember the parts about EAX 5 being the end-all-be-all, even though EAX 1,2 and 3 were basically nothing more than reverb. But how many games support EAX 5.0? I bet there's quite a few, except only about two of them are ones that I play or have any intention of ever playing.

Back in the day when processor speeds were in the double and triple digits, software audio wasn't great. Having 32mb of system memory also made it tough... But nowadays when you've got multiple cores, multiple gigahertz and enough memory to put an entire Win95 + program files into a ramdrive, I don't think it's that much of an issue.

The only potential claim is SQ -- and if you wanna be a SQ snob, buy a damned SPDIF-capable speaker set. My setup has both optical and coaxial outputs, as well as both optical and coaxial inputs. The cost of a $100 add-in card can be applied to a good set of SPDIF-capable speakers and you'd end up with better SQ anyway.
 
neliz said:
Could you show me then? Last time I checked the worst case scenario was 3%. I actually dropped my Audigy2ZS from my machine because it had some terrible sound bugs in Battlefield2 (Engine noise got reverbed like mad inside a vehicle and made driving anything unplayable... if the audigy can make my machine perform 15% better.. I'll stick it right in again..
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Vanguard uses the latest OpenAL sound system and loses at least 15% when switching from hardware OpenAL on a X-Fi to Generic Software.
 
Malo said:
Vanguard uses the latest OpenAL sound system and loses at least 15% when switching from hardware OpenAL on a X-Fi to Generic Software.
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I'm having a very difficult time finding any benchmark results that show this difference. Links?
 
My Audigy 2 ZS was $50 and included Jedi Academy, Halo, TR AOD, and Rogue Spear. Bought that in '04. A friend of mine picked up a pair of the cards for $35 total off eBay. So, why not? Why buy new speakers at all? I have some Klipsch 2.1s up front and a set of older Altec Lansing ACS48 in back. I can hardly even use them in my apt though so I frequently am running off a set of Sony MDR-V6 phones instead. I hear X-Fi has phenomenal headphone output, btw.

Now, for my notebook, I did blow $120 on the Audigy 2 PC Card the day it arrived. It sounds SO much better than the built-in Sigmatel crap..... Totally worth it and it works very well. I tried out a cheap USB option (Creative SB MP3+) initially and I'll say that the PC Card vastly outperforms USB if you want to play games with your audio solution. An absolutely obvious difference in frame rate in Painkiller, I remember.

One other thing I find rather valuable is the ability to use huge SoundFonts with DOSBOX. You can really make old games that used general MIDI sound amazing.
 
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neliz said:
Graphic cards with integrated sound cards for the win.
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Like R/RV6xx? :p
Okay, not fullblown soundcard, but still enough to pass on digital sound without any separate suond devices.

I'm not sure if there's something revolutionary coming in soundcard front, but I'm expecting quite a lot from Auzentech's new card, which will feature Creative's X-Fi audio processor, and implement a lot of features which aren't there on the X-Fi's.

More than just "advancements" in sound chips, I'd want the developers to start using sound better, I mean sure, there's all the fancy surround sound 5.1 and 7.1 and whatnot, but you can have really realistic sound positioning with just stereo, aka two channels, if you use headphones (well placed stereo speakers should work too (facing straight to your ears from sides on your ear level)
To see example of this, which is somewhere titled "holophonic audio", search for "Virtual haircut" and listen it with headphones on, you'll know what I mean ;)
 
Kaotik said:
More than just "advancements" in sound chips, I'd want the developers to start using sound better...
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What amazes me is when I hear game audio with compression artifacts. Do they actually pay a guy as an "expert" audio producer for that work? And a lot of games suffer from this. I'd have thought that once we moved into the days of CD-ROMs and PCs fully capable of 44.1 KHz / 16-bit audio, that we'd be done with quality problems like that. And with DVDs or those 4 CD games, gimme a break!

Doom 3 is a prime example, btw. Right at the title screen you can enjoy garbling artifacts in that MP3 music (or whatever compression they used).

UT2003/04 had music OGG files with 56-64 kbps bitrates.
 
Seeing as I'm in this forum, I'll add my piece. I bought an EMU-0404 a couple of months back, and it's definitely worth it. You get noise-free audio and super-low latency on audio functions, notably softsynths. I can run instruments in, apply audio effects in realtime, and hear the output in excellent quality. If you're just listening to audio, perhaps audio cards aren't necessary any more, as long as the audio outs are okay. The SBLive! had terribly noisy front speaker ports, and noise-free rear speakers. The independent kXdriver swapped the front and rear speakers and elliminated that headphone hiss! I don't know what ordinary outputs are like these days, but I imagine audio components tend towards low quality cheapness as it's the last consideration of buyers.
 
Shifty Geezer said:
The SBLive! had terribly noisy front speaker ports, and noise-free rear speakers.
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I wouldn't go that far. They aren't really noisy, at least not compared to the majority of onboard audio or their wonderful, earlier ISA cards. The quality of the SBLIVE's front output is worse than the rear, for sure, though. It uses some cheap AC97 DAC for the front and an I2S DAC for the rear. It's not THAT bad though.
http://kxproject.lugosoft.com/rear.php?language=en
http://www.pcavtech.com/soundcards/compare/index.htm

BTW, SB16 is the noisiest, pop-filled, static-ridden wreck I've ever heard. I was messing with several SB16s and an AWE32 (who thinks 8800 GTX is long, again?) fairly recently while trying to set up a Roland SCD-15 for some DOS gaming fun. I ended up scrapping that plan because the stupid cards have a defective DSP that causes stuck/missing notes (or even crazier stuff) with the waveblaster header unless you have one of the earliest SB16s. And this is ignoring the pops, clicks, and static that the POS cards frequently put out when they try to ouput digital audio. :)
 
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swaaye said:
I wouldn't go that far. They aren't really noisy, at least not compared to the majority of onboard audio or their wonderful, earlier ISA cards. The quality of the SBLIVE's front output is worse than the rear, for sure, though. It uses some cheap AC97 DAC for the front and an I2S DAC for the rear. It's not THAT bad though.
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I guess that's very subjective. Measuring it to 'no hiss at all' it's bad! Perhaps it's good compared to many a sound output, and perhaps many fol don't notice. But I've tried to minimize background noise including PC noise, and hiss is very apparent in my set-up. If SBLive's front speakers weren't that bad, I dread to think what a bad setup sounds like!
 
If you think Live! is bad, you've missed out on what's really bad.

The absolute worst sound I've ever heard is from the SB16. Pops, clicks, and static make a little noise floor seem like angelic purity by comparison. Next in the line of nastiness is the output of a SBPRO, with a hum caused by its onboard speaker amp. At least SB16 and AWE32 added line-out (their interpretation, anyway). And, with honorary mention, I'd bring up the Realtek ALC650 output on a Shuttle AN35 nForce2 board I had. It was just loaded with noise and it sounded almost monaural.

The 90db SNR that SBLive has was considered excellent for PC gaming sound cards up until around the turn of the century. I actually have some Ensoniq Soundscape cards that advertised 90 db SNR as a feature, believe it or not. They were all the rage at the same time as the overpriced AWE cards.

Nowadays, I'd say that there really aren't any really bad cards as long as you stick with something with a brand name on it..... Those $10 Newegg specials with generic VIA/Cmedia/Realtek chips are pretty scary. But, hey, who knows? Maybe one of them is the ultimate in signal perfection!
 
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swaaye said:
I'd have thought that once we moved into the days of CD-ROMs and PCs fully capable of 44.1 KHz / 16-bit audio, that we'd be done with quality problems like that. And with DVDs or those 4 CD games, gimme a break!
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Unfortunately, memory hasn't grown as fast as physical media storage space and neither has sound variety in games stagnated. ;)

Doom 3 is a prime example, btw. Right at the title screen you can enjoy garbling artifacts in that MP3 music (or whatever compression they used).

UT2003/04 had music OGG files with 56-64 kbps bitrates.
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D3/Q4/Prey uses OGG Vorbis for audio that is seldom played (like VO, menu music, etc.) so it saves memory at the expense of some CPU power. I don't have D3 here to test but VLC tells me Q4's menu music is 44Khz 128kbps bitrate.
 
See I told you Holophonics is the Holy Grail of HRTF....

Ive just remembered my legacy pc has a soundcard with an Aureal Vortex 2 chip and ive never heard a3d 2.0 done before. A3d was superior to eax in its day although the live did support a3d 1.0 by translating it to ds3d A3d 2.0 was considered too difficult and cpu comsuming for a software solution to be attempted.

"A3D uses a subset of the actual in-game 3D world data to accurately model the location of both direct (A3Dspace) and reflected (A3Dverb) sound streams (A3D 2.0 can perform up to 60 first-order reflections). EAX 1.0, the competing technology at the time promoted by Creative Labs, simulated the environment with an adjustable reverb -- it didn't calculate any actual reflections off of the 3D surfaces."
 
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