Audigy PCMCIA Card resulted in huge gaming performance increase!!

Hi iv owned an Audigy PCMCIA sound card for a few months now, but only tried to use it while gaming the other day as i finally got a proper desk to game at on my laptop. WHen i used the card while gaming i saw a massive framrate increase and any and all sort of momentary lag that i may have had in games disapeared!

For instance: When playing FEAR (before i used the audigy card) the only settings i use to have off were AA and i had AF at 8x.. Soft Shadows off, Volumetric lighting-med, Water res-med and Shadows-med. The game ran smooth but i had to keep the above settings as they were to keep the game from jumping the odd time when going into different areas of buildings. I monitored the fps via Fraps and saw that these settings were best to aviod any sort of lag.
Then the other day i was playing the first mission with the card (sound was unreal!) and just out of curiousity i opened FRAPS and saw that the average fps was 10-15 fps higher than normal! And in some dark areas it went even higher! I know that sounds like waffle but trust me its not.

So seing as my fps was much "healthier" i Turned EVERYTHING to MAX(AA/AF/shadows/vol lighting) to see how it impacted the game.. And guess what, it ran perfect!! The fps was averaging with everyting at max the way it did with my previous settings before i put in the audigy card!. I literally cant believe this as im sure some people wont.

I have read from some of the game manuals that users should not use "on board sound", but a seperate sound card and i can see why!

There was one area of the FEAR Extraction point demo where you walk into a room where theres blood everywhere and them red eyed demons are around...when i was just standing there, my FPS used to go down to 12-14 which is as low as iv ever seen it in FEAR. But when i went into the same area (with increased settings) and with my audigy card plugged in, the FPS was running at a steady 24-28fps! Unbelieveable!!

Has anyone else encountered something like this?? I guess games like fear that are pretty sound intensive, demand alot from your hardware. And its probably worth noting that the area in FEAR Extraction point that i mentioned had a huge amount of backround noise (music and that little freaks vioce echoing in the backround).

 

Eh...My X1600 with 4000 pts in 3DMark05 couldn't run everything at max, especially with shadows. I dunno, sounds fishy...maybe you installed new drivers?

I will try FEAR with my X1600 OC'd (4500+ 3DMark 05 score), I still doubt it'll run well with everything on max though...

 

You have a magick notebook, cherish it...

 

Did you see the performance increase in all games or only in F.E.A.R.? I use an Audigy 2 ZS Notebook PCMCIA card in my laptop; the primary reason I bought it was to get an interference-free headphone and microphone jack. I do not know how much of a performance increase I get when playing games (if there is any), but I can tell you that it is not significant.

 

hmmm, sounds fishy

 

That does seem like quite an increase in performance. I'm also curious to see what you get in other games.

 

Wow! I get background noise from the sound card in my L100 so maybe an external card will help my sound AND my fps too!

Lord knows I need better fps.

 

Like other people said: that sounds fishy I really like that word, hehe.

Are you sure that it is a soundcard that you have bought and not an external 7900GTX Go? Sorry for the sarcasm, but increasing so much FPS with just one sound card seems weird.

I can remember a review of this product. In game it just scored a few fps (1-2) higher. Not a big deal, but it does give you great sound.

Charlie

 

having a dedicated sound card (in a desktop or notebook) will result in an increase of performance.... nominal at best though.

The more CPU cycles that are available to better to performance. The integrated sound cards are software driven (taking up some of the CPU cycles).

It was shown at this year's E3 (at the Fatal1ty booth) that a dedicated (decent) sound card will result in a 5-10 frames per sec increase.. for the newest games anyways.

I was surprised at the increase (i played on serveral of the demos w/ and w/o the soundcard), but not too blown away. I think if you have a single core, the difference would be greater.

 

Thats the thing. Its not that my "average fps" was increased drastically.. But in areas that i saw my fps falling before, this didnt happen when i was using the audigy card.. Its hard to explain... turning up the settings didnt impact game perfromance the way it did when i was running off my onboard sound. And i must add that i was mistaken when i said i was running at 4xAA..it was actaully 2X and Everything else at MAX. 4x AA resulted in some lag in places. And the resolution can only go as high as 1024x768 in FEAR on a notebook as im sure uz all know. OH and soft shadows were off! As that turned on completely wrecks performance! Even though you cant see any real difference in how the shadows look.
But yes everything was maxed at 1024x768 (except for 2X AA and soft shadows)
Its like its only when my laptop is really being taxed in certain parts of the gameplay that the audigy card makes the difference. Like in that scene i mentioned where my fps used to drop to 12-14 and now stays well in the 20's.. And as i said when i tried to play the game before at max settings without the card, the game used to "hop" quite alot when going into differet areas or say when id throw a grenade there would be a momentary freeze as the grenade exploded.. Well with the sound card plugged in, this all stopped.
In a nutshell the main NOTICABLE benefit was that any and all types of in game freezing disapeared!! Gameplay was perfectly smooth throughout!

Il try and make a recording with FRAPS to show uz.. But can some1 tell me how i can make a recording more than 10seconds with FRAPS and with sound?? Coz i couldnt get it to work the last time..

Well here is something interesting. FEAR is where i noticed the most significant performance difference. Another demanding game i own is Call of Juarez and i didnt notice any real performance increase with the card for this game.. I DID however notice a difference when playing X3 Reunion (unreal game) The difference was the same obvious difference i experienced with FEAR...there was no lag where there was lag before. Using the card resulted in much smoother gameplay at the same high settings..

 

well, that is a really big increase, but i do believe it really helps. on my old desktop amd athalon 3700+, 2 gigs of ram, x850XT) both me and my sister prefered playing oblivion on it then my lapptop (core duo 2 gigahertz, 7900gtx, 2 gigs of ram) simply becuase the frame rate was alot more stable, it felt soooooo much better to play on.

 

I noticed you posted screenshots in another thread, but it still sounds fishy...heheh I love using that term. Anyway, the reason is because the bottleneck in all graphics intensive games in notebooks is the GPU, not the CPU. While a dedicated PCMCIA sound card may be able to relieve some burden from the CPU, it will certainly do nothing to assist the GPU. The only reasonable explanation is maybe your CPU was slow enough that the extra time needed to process the audio was preventing game instructions from being carried out in a timely manner. By moving those calculations off to your PCMCIA card, it lessened the burden and resulted in lag-free gameplay.

 

Does anyone think an external sound card like a Live or Audigy 2 NX going thru usb would have a similar effect?

 

What's happening here, if true, is almost a miracle - usually you might get a frame or two extra but nothing this significant. And it helps the workload on the cpu, so if you have a good processor and poor gpu, you won't notice much difference.

 

In Oblivion I would believe it, especially on a Dell. That game performs for crap on the integrated Sigmatel audio.

 

Some (note, not all) onboard sound chips use *lots* of CPU (up to 30% in some cases)

So yeah, a dedicated sound card is one of those things every gamer should have, because it *can* provide a very noticeable performance boost (in addition to better sound)... But instead, people tend to ignore that, and buy expensive RAID 0 setups that don't actually improve performance...

 

Another thing to consider is that F.E.A.R. is a pretty sound-intensive game. You don't really notice anything, but using onboard audio, changing sound from maximum to minimum gives a HUGE increase in performance. Not to mention, F.E.A.R. isn't multithreaded, so it's only using one core of your processor. Therefore, i wouldn't be suprised if it gave you some substantial performance increase, though I find it a little hard to believe that it's as good as what was described. But I would believe it would give you about 5-10fps, especially if the onboard audo was really bad.

 

I use Logitech v20 USB speakers, and if what's been said here is true, then the built in sound card of my USB speakers should speed up my gameplay (not using the Realtek integrated). It doesn't.

For RAID 0, as with all tech, one must investigate the purpose before making the purchase. It won't help your frames per second, but if you're loading a huge map file or save game (as is often the case these days), then you're looking at quite a few seconds saved every load, and quite possibly hours every month.