Looking to upgrade. How much/will I get an improvement?

[Cyris]

(01-12-2011, 06:46 AM)NaturalViolence Wrote:

Quote:since you do alot of audio work you maybe want to get a dedicated sound card to relieve the load off your CPU even though your CPU can probably do the work fine but your playback will be better especially when you start to buy those studio monitors if you go that far.

At the moment the only backend that pc audio cards can hardware accelerate is openAL, and even then it's very limited (pretty much just pcm mixing and post-processing, occasionally decoding if the application is set up using the proper api). Anything else would require a wrapper with an api hook. If he wants it for audio quality sure. But buying an audio hard to try and relieve cpu load from decoding is stupid in this day and age.

true. i haven't had a sound card since the soundblaster 16 with the old school game controller port in the back for the MS sidewinder lmao

[NaturalViolence]

Hardware accelerated audio died with eax3/4/5 and second generation x-fi. And if it wasn't already dead xaudio2, windows vista, and macosx put the final three nails in the coffin. A real shame if you ask me...I loved eax (I had a creative x-fi xtrememusic edition). Fast vector math and multithreading made cpus do everything audio related just as fast as an audio processor could, thus eliminating the need. That combined with fairly good integrated audio chipsets becoming common made people stop buying audio cards, which killed the industry. But a lot of people (myself included) kept buying audio cards for the processing effects/high quality DAC/EMI shielding/good opamps which give them much better snr than anything an integrated system can produce. However it appears that even that is starting to die out now that a lot of pc audio enthusiasts are bitstreaming audio to a good receiver instead using modern video cards.

Quote:true. i haven't had a sound card since the soundblaster 16 with the old school game controller port in the back for the MS sidewinder lmao

Ah yes. Back when creative ruled the audio card industry and had excellent hardware AND drivers. Before the dark days....before x-fi. Just switched over from an xi-fi xtrememusic edition (creative) to a xonar hdav1.3 slim (asus) for christmas last year and could not be happier. But man back then you HAD to have a soundblaster 16 if you wanted good audio.

.....looks like I've derailed another thread here. Well the OP was talking about audio a lot so I guess it's not that derailed .