Gaming + DSPs (Any Difference?)

[Z3r0c00l]

There has been a lot of talk lately about the Asus Xonar based cards. I set out to test both the Asus Xonar DX 7.1 and the Asus Xonar Essence STX to see how they would fare against, what I consider to be, the king of 3D gaming sound cards Auzentech's X-Fi based Forte 7.1 in CPU usage and game sound reproduction. Just to humor everyone I also tested the onboard audio based on the Realtek ALC889A codec.


Test system used:

CPU: Q9550 (stock)
MOBO: Gigabyte EP45-UD3P
RAM: 4GB Corsair DDR2 800
VID: eVGA GTX260 C216
Windows XP-64bit

Rightmark 3DS Testing (CPU Usage/Sound Buffers)

Direct Sound 2D



Direct Sound 3D



Direct Sound 3D+EAX



The results really surprised me. Quite a few people state that onboard audio is the same as any add in sound card which seems to be false.
When objectively comparing audio quality the STX definitely won me over in Stereo Headphone use (paired with my Sennheiser HD650s) which is better suited when listening to lossless music tracks. When it came to movies though, the Forte was the clear winner with a richer deeper bass and better positional audio. Since I don't use standard speakers (Yamaha home Theater setup) the onboard audio would cause pops and clicks (distortion). This became quite annoying.

[mew905]

wow, this is actually VERY useful information for me. You said the Forte is an X-Fi based card? I did notice having a dedicated card reduced choppiness in games when playing in 5.1 (yeah, it was slightly choppy playing CS:S, even though my framerate is 70+)

I was considering getting a sound card specifically to reduce CPU usage, (you may remember me asking this a while back in this section), thank you very much.

Request: Would you be able to test in Vista? I hear hardware acceleration in Vista is bad compared to XP

[Z3r0c00l]

Sure I can try Vista x64.
EAX tests will be lacking though for everything except the Forte (OpenAL with Alchemy).