Hi all,There's a lengthy dicussion of soundcards and texture issues over in the PMDG forum and got me thinking about performance.Back in the FS8 and FS9, it was believed that adding a 3rd-party soundcard such as the Creative X-Fi brands, that have their own on-board audio processor, would offload the cycles from the CPU. Remember, every cycle counts, and that part is still true today.So with today's systems such as the i7-line, is it still considered beneficial to add a good sound processor to a PCI or PCIe slot and shutoff the on-board audio processor in the BIOS? I recently removed my Creative X-Fi XtremeGamer Pro PCI board and turned on the MB SoundMax audio, and I can't tell if there's a difference in performance, or not. Not being very subjective, the 5.1 audio quality sounded about the same to me.If peformance is still a benefit of such addon cards for FSX, then has anyone upgraded from say a older Creative PCI board to a more recent Creative PCIe board and noticed a difference?

I previously used dedicated sound cards, but with my latest computer build (see sig) I use the on board sound device only. I'm not a Hi Fi freak and I think the on board sound works very well. No problems at all.

Most modern day built in soundcards are of good quality. The downside is that many use the CPU to do some of the sound processing whereas a good add-on card will NOT do this. So there is the potential gain of less CPU resources used by the CPU.Often times however this is offset by bloatware programs that these addon soundcards require for you to get all of the additional bells and whistles.Personally I've had better luck with add-on cards. Non Flight Sim related games that are demanding on the system can sometimes have audio stuttering effects occur due to not enough resources available on the CPU during extreme action sequences. This is where the add-on card will shine.

I don't believe there's any real functional difference now between on-board audio chips (I prefer the Realtek ones to the SoundMax ones) and the third party cards like the X-Fi, Asus Xonar etc... They're all essentially using the same broad type of chipset and any of them can do all the stuff like 7.1, EAX etc... I'm using the on-board audio (Realtek HD) on my mobo and have never had a problem with it. I've seen CPU usage benchmarks and it's a non-issue with today's CPUs, it's a totally minuscule amount. Many of the addon boards are using the exact same chipsets as the mobo ones, they're not really "accelerated" in any way.The one thing that I have noticed with on-board is slight noise coming through it sometimes when I do certain things on screen, like scrolling a graphically intensive webpage etc - this happens because the circuits are so close together on the mobo and it's actually EMI from whatever else is going through the mobo's bus channels. Most people probably would never hear it (especially through actual speakers) but I use a set of $300 studio headphones (Beyerdynamic DT770s if anyone's interested) most of the time and it's audible through those. It's not enough to make me go out and purchase a dedicated card though. For actual audio recording and stuff (I'm a professional guitarist in my "day job" if you guys didn't know), I use a Digidesign Digi003, which is a $1500 external audio I/O box along with its ProTools DAW software. It's not something you can really use as a "soundcard" though, it's purpose is recording and mixing music and it's actually less capable in terms of "gaming audio" than the little chip on your mobo...

It's probably my imagination but when I tried using the Alchemy drivers with my sound card (these give access to sound card acceleration in Vista/ Windows 7, which is otherwise unavailable under the new Windows driver model) I THOUGHT I got a very slightly improved framerate. I didn't measure it but that was my sense. I don't think it was auto-suggestion, because I wasn't "looking" for it (I had only installed the Alchemy drivers to try to resolve a specific issue with my sound card), but it could have been the particular combination of clouds etc which made the difference.So IMHO the jury is still out on whether sound cards have the POTENTIAL to improve performance, given the right drivers. As for sound quality: long ago choice of card mattered quite a lot. But the difference between the cards I have owned in recent years has become marginal to the point of being undetectable to my ears. So personally I would no longer buy an add-on card just for better quality of sound.Tim

NONE - NADA - ZERO - ZIP - NOTHING3 years ago and before that time, YES.. today. NOOnboard hardware and advanced ACPI driver technology has renedered the need for a sound card for the purpose of offloading the CPU and more important bus latency, useless The only reason a sound card is needed in this day and age is for full-on hardware audio ENCODING support for those who need it for AV production work, OR, if a user wishes to have a 2nd sound device to handle another app running WITH FSX and then the user IS in fact using more CPU regardless of the card in use.. otherwise its a waste!

Now this is why I love this forum. Not only very good help learning the technology, but very good help keeping up with it over a period of time as well. Thanks everyone, I will keep my old X-Fi out of the rig. One less thing to cram in there :(

I had the same issue recently and whilst I agree with the line of thought that all modern motherboards have pretty decent sound on board, I tried this with my new build and had some small glitches and interference (particularly noticeable as I use headphones).I then threw in my old SBLive 5.1 and happy days. So while I agree that the cycle difference on the CPU would be negligible, I do believe that if you let a dedicated card do the job it's supposed to do then your system will be better for it.For now I am keeping mine in as any overheads caused by it are certainly not evident from here. In other games like FP Shooters (not that I play that many) the card makes abig difference. But for general simming I agree your on board sound is more than enough.

Now this is why I love this forum. Not only very good help learning the technology, but very good help keeping up with it over a period of time as well. Thanks everyone, I will keep my old X-Fi out of the rig. One less thing to cram in there :Whew:

If you consider this forum as a

I can also confirm the thing with the noise when scrolling. I tested also on my system the difference, and there is absolutely none performance-wise.But when scrolling in any, or doing anything that requires computer to step on it, I hear a noise. Also I have a feeling its connected to the mouse movement sometimes. Given also that I am not using a cheap soundset (check sig if interested).

If you consider this forum as a "one stop shop" for hardware info then you're fooling yourself. Getting information from a variety of hardware forums/sites is your best bet if you want to keep up and learn something.

:( Come on dude, do really think I build and OC rigs like those below by reading one forum? I've been building systems since the 286 days and I would've built my Commodore-128 if I could have figured out how to cram all the parts into a keyboard, LOL... I played my first FS on a Alan Bradley 8086 Industrial Controller in 1985, which loaded from two 5-1/4" floppies and took most of my lunch-break to load.This particular hardware forum is great because it has a singular goal of FS in mind; thereby focusing 'these' discussions to that end.

As far as the sound cards go if all you do is play FSX or FS9 then no you're probably not going to benefit much from a high end dedicated sound card. If you play other games/sims, especially ones that support EAX, then yes, a dedicated sound card such as an X-Fi will be useful.

But according to posts above, today's modern on-board chips do support EAX...

I know I'm not going to trade my PCI-E X-Fi cards for on-board sound anytime soon.

If you already have one installed, then I don't think anyone would blame you if you didn't... That's what makes PC's better than set-top boxes, customize them to your own needs.

If you consider this forum as a

But according to posts above, today's modern on-board chips do support EAX...

Even the best on-board sound solutions do not fully support full EAX 5.0. The ones that do support EAX do it through software using an ADA chip. Better than say low budget on-board Realtek, but not what you get with a true X-Fi sound card.

:( Come on dude, do really think I build and OC rigs like those below by reading one forum? I've been building systems since the 286 days and I would've built my Commodore-128 if I could have figured out how to cram all the parts into a keyboard, LOL... I played my first FS on a Alan Bradley 8086 Industrial Controller in 1985, which loaded from two 5-1/4" floppies and took most of my lunch-break to load.This particular hardware forum is great because it has a singular goal of FS in mind; thereby focusing 'these' discussions to that end.But according to posts above, today's modern on-board chips do support EAX...If you already have one installed, then I don't think anyone would blame you if you didn't... That's what makes PC's better than set-top boxes, customize them to your own needs.

AlI remember a sim - was it called "Night Flight"? - on my Vic-20 in the VERY early 1980s. Then there was the BBC Micro (did you get them in the States?) and the Sinclair Spectrum with another very basic flight sim. In my wildest imagination I could never have foreseen what we've got now.Happy days.Tim

AlI remember a sim - was it called "Night Flight"? - on my Vic-20 in the VERY early 1980s. Then there was the BBC Micro (did you get them in the States?) and the Sinclair Spectrum with another very basic flight sim. In my wildest imagination I could never have foreseen what we've got now.Happy days.Tim

No, I can't say as I do Tim. My first experience with a computer and a flightsim, if you want to call it that, was riding my bike over to the local Radio Shack store and loading the flight-game from a casette tape on one of their first personal computers for sale, and playing the game until the sales-clerk got tired of us and kicked us out, LOL...My favorite fighter game was Microprose F-117A stealth fighter on the Commodore and then I really got stuck on the big-irons with Sublogic's Airline Transport Pilot (ATP) during my 286 -> 486 days. I even used to have the six huge world-jet route charts pinned up on the walls. The first wife wasn't too keen on those decorations, LOL... I got back into MS FS in the Windows 95 days and the rest is history, mostly here on AVSIM. :(