that if you turn off audio acceleration, you get nearly a 10fps jump?Maybe it is just me, as I have built-in audio on Realtek drivers, but I consistently get 8-15 fps by turning this off. Hmmm...

It's your on board audio stealing cycles from the CPU.The only answer is to add a sound card.Fred

No difference at all in FPS for me on my onboard sound with changing this setting, as measured by http://forums.avsim.net/dcboard.php?az=sho..._id=24071&page=I don't know how old your motherboard is, but in my experience onboard sound in most motherboards from the last two years have not been the FPS-sucking beasts they used to be. Gary

I used RealTek AC97 onboard sound for a while, and it did not affect FPS at all one way or the other.This is on an nForce4 chipset board.As was said, in the old days on-board sound was a major cpu stealer. Not so much anymore.RhettAMD 3700+ (@2310 mhz), eVGA 7800GT 256 (Guru3D 93.71), ASUS A8N-E, PC Power 510 SLI, 2 GB Corsair XMS 2.5-3-3-8 (1T), WD 250 gig 7200 rpm SATA2, CoolerMaster Praetorian case

I agree, however would like to add that it seems to vary from board to board. Some of the cheaper boards out there tend to use lower quality onboard sound systems that seem to eat up some cpu cycles more than the AC97 does. Thank goodness AC97 is fairly standard these days!