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Thread: Discrete sound card, boosting GPU performance?

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    Discrete sound card, boosting GPU performance?

    Someone told me that adding a discrete sound card can reduce load on the mobo and enable better GPU performance.

    Just wondering if anyone can confirm this? And if so, can you explain why?

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    Re: Discrete sound card, boosting GPU performance?

    I have never heard that in my life
    Jon

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    Re: Discrete sound card, boosting GPU performance?

    Quote Originally Posted by Samwood View Post
    Someone told me that adding a discrete sound card can reduce load on the mobo and enable better GPU performance.

    Just wondering if anyone can confirm this? And if so, can you explain why?
    Nope.

    If you are CPU limited, then anything that reduces load on CPU will improve performance. That's all.

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    Re: Discrete sound card, boosting GPU performance?

    what's your system specs?
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    Re: Discrete sound card, boosting GPU performance?

    Yes but only in extreme circumstances
    I had three GPU's running on my RIVE with the PCI-E lanes run @16x 8x 16x
    When I added my PCI-E sound card the lanes dropped down to 16x 8x 8x 8x
    I then decided to run an external sound card so I could run the GPU's in the quicker configuration.

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    Re: Discrete sound card, boosting GPU performance?

    Ok, well I doubt it'll make a difference on my system then.

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    Re: Discrete sound card, boosting GPU performance?

    From the specifications you have listed, an internal sound card will not be an issue.

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    Re: Discrete sound card, boosting GPU performance?

    many many years ago tomshardware did an article:

    http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/sound-...iew-26565.html

    on the difference between different sound chips and any gains for offboard vs onboard.

    now that was 9 yers ago (and still a good read)

    but with vista and win 7 , hardware processing is pretty much non existant (unless you had a shell layer , eg creatives alchemy for audigy and xfi , soundback for alc chipsets and DS3D-GX for cmedia)

    with win8 it*should* be back for the cards doing the work

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    Re: Discrete sound card, boosting GPU performance?

    Thanks for the article. Looks like they're suggesting that onboard cards can (slightly) increase CPU bottle neck. I doubt i'm going to get that on my system.... at least not for 2 or 3 upgrades.

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    Re: Discrete sound card, boosting GPU performance?

    Yeah, this was true about 15 years ago back in the land of Windows 95, and very limited computing resources.
    Back then everything had to be processed, or at least co-ordinated by the CPU, and so off-loading anything to something dedicated to a task was less for the CPU to do.
    It's really not the case now, as a) so much is modular and b) we have huge, huge capacity within a modern CPU.
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    Re: Discrete sound card, boosting GPU performance?

    With audio no one seems to really care these days, you can tell this as most modern motherboard reviews barley mentions the onboard audio codec never mind running any benchmarks.

    As said this was down to Microsoft removing the the DirectSound and DirectSound 3D HAL from both Vista and 7 infavor of UAA and more and more games using software audio API's such as FMOD however this does not automatically mean that any onboard solution is equal to proper hardware cards of the past, I spent around 10 minutes using the onboard Realtek ALC898 before uninstalling the software, disabling the codec and installing my old X-Fi Titanium Fatal1ty Pro on my fairly new build because the sound quality or rather lack of it and the lastest Realtek drivers were taking CPU cycles for no reason.

    Anyway here's an old review of my X-Fi vs Realtek ALC889a under XP and Vista which also makes for interesting reading: http://www.hardcoreware.net/reviews/review-373-1.htm

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    Re: Discrete sound card, boosting GPU performance?

    Quote Originally Posted by HalloweenJack View Post
    but with vista and win 7 , hardware processing is pretty much non existant (unless you had a shell layer , eg creatives alchemy for audigy and xfi , soundback for alc chipsets and DS3D-GX for cmedia)
    Hardware level processing can be done by anything that uses Open AL (which is basically everything that matters today) if developers want to. Vista / 7 only dropped hardware support for the old DirectSound3D API.

    The problem isn't hardware acceleration, it's that Creative and others just can't be arsed with taking sound seriously any more. Creatives OpenAL driver STILL crashes in UT3 FFS. You need to mess around with hacks like this, which is beyond stupid in 2012.
    Keep in mind that the vast majority of audio on the PC is precomputed. Things like playing a sound in most applications are just reading and playing a sound file. Blu-rays / DVD's / Videos / Music all fall into this category. Just decode the stream and dump it to the sound port - easy.
    Games are one of the few applications that can benefit from hardware acceleration (although not massively with modern CPUs and software techniques)..... this is then a major PITA when Creative has an OpenAL driver which often crashes in the biggest used game engine in the world....it's just insane.

    It was mostly Creative that got us into this mess in the first place - crashing drivers, poor support and so on....I don't blame MS for pulling hardware level support given the number of crashes that used to happen due to sound.

    Check Rapture3D out (you *must* use headphones). That's pure software and shows what developers can do when they know what they are doing with sound.

    So, windows 8 and hardware acceleration... Useful - sure, it will allow mixing, effects, decoding etc. to be done on hardware, but the truth is that it's not really an issue right now for desktop users. I suspect it's more due to:
    *Dolby digital being included in Win 8
    *Being able to accelerate audio on non desktop machines (Tablets for example) where audio on the CPU is expensive (certainly for games)


    Anyway - what I'm really trying to get at here is that Windows V/7 has a path to hardware acceleration through OpenAL if needed. This entire "V/7 can't / has issues / won't accelerate audio" is nonsense, it's just different to XP for very good reasons. We should not expect any massive audio improvement to games at all with this change, although there is no doubt Creative will market it as such. If you have excess CPU cycles, then it doesn't matter if the maths for the audio is done there or 'hardware accelerated' on a soundcard, it's irrelevant.

    Not all aimed at you Jack, it's just an important topic that a lot of people misunderstand
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    Re: Discrete sound card, boosting GPU performance?

    @Agent - A lot of that went over my head... In simple terms, does the onboard sound card on my Asus P8Z77-V put load on my CPU? If so how much?

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    Banhammer in peace PeterB kalniel's Avatar
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    Re: Discrete sound card, boosting GPU performance?

    Quote Originally Posted by Samwood View Post
    @Agent - A lot of that went over my head... In simple terms, does the onboard sound card on my Asus P8Z77-V put load on my CPU? If so how much?
    In realistic terms, no more than a discrete sound card would.

    What units are you asking how much in? As you can see from the links given earlier there's about a 0.3% difference in framerate in a CPU-bound situation for most games. And I guarantee you will not be able to notice the difference between 160 and 160.5 fps in said CPU-bound situation.

    Unless you're running an atom CPU or something, performance is simply not a reason to pick a discrete sound card. There are other reasons, but that is not one of them.

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    Re: Discrete sound card, boosting GPU performance?

    ^^ Couldn't have said it better
    Quote Originally Posted by Saracen View Post
    And by trying to force me to like small pants, they've alienated me.

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    Re: Discrete sound card, boosting GPU performance?

    Very informative posts. I was thinking of getting a Xonar, but I guess I'll stick with onboard sound.

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