Melcar

Was going to do a more extensive test with fglrx included, but the damn driver would not install. Anyway, the test ended up as a sound performance test (onboard vs. discrete) and the results are rather depressing.
The system is the "Scrapbox" under my systems list. The first run was done using onboard sound (generic AC97) while the second one with an Audigy2 Value. Both runs are using the open source "radeon" driver (build 6.8.0) and ALSA (build 1.0.16).



http://global.phoronix-test-suite.co...901-15426-8064

Maybe it's the particular sound card I used, but even then one would expect the discrete card to offer some amount of performance increase. It actually scored lower. What's even more, this is with a single core CPU, so if this is true for all sound cards, running onboard sound with a multicore CPU is more than enough even for gaming.

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onlycodered

Not much of a difference there. Another reason why I'm going to hold out on buying a sound card until I've upgraded my other components first.

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Melcar

This is in Linux though. Not sure if it also applies for Windows, but I doubt it does. Right now, the only difference I can see between the two is sound quality, which is even less of a difference in Linux, since most of the filters and acceleration features one enjoys in Windows are nearly absent in Linux.

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Melcar

Found some old benchies that pretty much conclude the same:

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...item=416&num=3

Going to try testing more games and see. It would be interesting to see if there is a bigger performance gap in Windows.

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rabidgnome229

Who the hell buys a sound card to increase gaming performance? That's like buying a bigger hard drive to increase your fps. Sound cards are about sound quality - not everything about a system can be characterized by FPS.

There will always be some difference from utilizing different system resources, but that difference will be negligible.

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BIG BROTHER

I put on my robe and wizard hat...

IS WATCHING

Melcar

Back in the day, everyone used to say that a discrete card helped offload some load from the CPU, but I think that applied more to the many filters and effects that were usually possible with hardware accelerated sound (EAX and all that junk). For straight out sound, the only real difference is overall sound quality, specially true under Linux, where you don't have any of that proprietary hardware accelerated stuff like DTS and EAX.
That was in the olden days of single core CPUs and more limited hardware. Now with the near extinction of many acceleration features (very few people still use things like EAX), there is little need for hardware acceleration. Add to that the fall from grace of Creative (the only hardware vendor that really pushed hardware accelerated sound) and many OS' (like Vista) implementing their own brand of software mixed sound.

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