Do I really Need a Sound Card?

[Killerobe]

I like my music clear and my explosions loud. I also like to practice DJ'ing and and produce music on my computer. The question is do I really need a sound card or is my mobo sound enough? My last computer had a sound card and worked great for me. But I'm wondering with my new build is it really worth it to pony up 150 bucks for a decent sound card?

Current mobo is ASUS Z68 Deluxe with realtek audio drivers currently installed.

Thanks!

[DviddLeff]

I've had a 7.1 card for about ten years; I don't know if its ever made a huge difference but 7.1 surround sound is amazing if you have the right space to set it up in.

Now I use headphones though so the 7.1 is a bit of a waste.

[Traak]

I figure any improvement in performance is not going to make me feel any worse about being in the game.

Having only laptops to play on the last few years, yes, a sound card would have been aweseome, to me. Framerates always slowed down when a lot of sounds happened at once.

You can get inexpensive sound cards, and they make it so that there is just that much less for the processor to actually deal with by processing the sound instead.

Besides, you have a lot more choices on how the environment sounds with a sound card.

In any case, I would not play it without at least front and rear speakers plus a subwoofer. Hearing which direction planes are coming from is half the battle when doing AA.

With only stereo sound, it's like walking around in real life with one eye closed.

You can get headphones that produce electronically-altered sound that makes it so you can still hear front and rear (Razer Megalodon, for example) sound.

Best is surround speakers, however, if you have the space, and no one to complain about it.

[Rbstr]

I've always been a sound card guy.
Performance wise sound ain't much to a modern CPU. Most games are GPU-bottle necked.

Now if you care about sound quality and have decent speakers having a sound card will make a difference to your ears...mostly in music and the like.

I've got basically this http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16829102023
Dono if it's the exact same. Got it way back when it was the first/only pci-ex card available.

(This is a great opportunity to plug these: http://www.m-audio.com/products/en_us/MAudioAV40.html
They're so much better than any 2.1 logitec or altec set I've ever had)

[BorisBlade]

My mobo has the 7.1 built in and sounds great. Now not every mobo will be as good but i have a feeling your's will be just as good being a "deluxe" model. The last asus deluxe board i had was great.

As was already said, its not gonna make your game run any better using a sound card, modern CPU's are far beyond that point. And honestly, with a good on board setup, unless you have some really really really hardcore needs, which would mean somethin beyond gaming, then a seperate sound card is wasted money you could have used on a better vid card. Or even better speakers. =)

Again not all on board sound cards are great, some do suck, some suck bigtime. But atleast in this situation, you dont need a seperate card.

Not sure what speakers you have, but getting a good setup with those will be much more impactful than any card swap would ever do. I had a friend askin about a sound card while using just a simple stereo setup, totally pointless. 2.1 is a minimum imo, gotta have a sub or games just dont sound right at all. I run a 5.1 atm, once i get my new game room set up, I am thinkin of pickin up the 7.1 since i'll have the appropriate room set up to do it.

[Rbstr]

2.1 is a minimum imo, gotta have a sub or games just dont sound right at all. I run a 5.1 atm, once i get my new game room set up, I am thinkin of pickin up the 7.1 since i'll have the appropriate room set up to do it.

I'm 100% gonna say a decent set of stereo speakers is far beyond a typical "computer speaker" 2.1 set, bass included.

When you talk surround sound, I used to run the optical out to a home theater receiver back when I was in a studio apt. Again it's a more expensive option than the "computer speaker" surround set but way superior sound quality.
It's not too hard to find an older receiver and set of speakers.

[Hamma]

I usually don't do sound cards but with my most recent computer I did. I must admit I am disappointed I didn't have one all these years, the sound quality is so much better even with headphones.

[Traak]

Note that, for gaming, a higher number of DirectSound 3D voices is going to be more important. Especially for Planetside, with more than 64 players, explosions, engine sounds, guns, and whatever going on around you at once.

Here is an article that tells you all about sound cards and what to look for.

Very informative, gets you behind the marketing hype and reveals some facts about audio.

http://techreport.com/articles.x/4577

Quite informative about what sound quality depends on, and what does what on the card.

Here's a more recent comparison, just a chart, really.

http://sound-cards-review.toptenreviews.com/

Note that for gamers, having the latest EAX available on the card's hardware is always going to depend on having the Sound Blaster, because they don't license their latest EAX version to anyone until they have a morer latester version.

[Goku]

Traak. Directsound is actually dead from the release of Vista/7. Those operating systems do not support it anymore. EAX is dead as well as it relied on Directsound. There hasn't been any games made for years that even make use of EAX actually.

[Rbstr]

Yup^^
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DirectSound#Windows_Vista.2FWindows_7

Creative has a workaround program for older games...but who really cares about getting 133 instead of 130 fps?

[Traak]

So what sound standards do they use now, the universal ones for surround sound?

[Goku]

So what sound standards do they use now, the universal ones for surround sound?

I am not sure if there is a universal one to be honest.

[Traak]

Well, I know there is THX and their competitor: Dolby.

[Rbstr]

You're talking about different things.
The output format, like Dolby or DTS is not equivelent to DirectSound.
DirectSound is like DirectX but for sound, essentially an API. DTS and the like are output formats - The signals that get sent to the playback hardware (data that goes to the speakers/receiver, analogous to how things go over HDMI/DVI or VGA to a monitor/television).

And THX is only a certification, it doesn't really have anything to do with processing, except that the certification means it's held to a certain quality.

Seriously, at least wikipedia stuff before talking about things you obviously don't understand.

[Traak]

.

[Traak]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directsound

DirectSound is a software component of the Microsoft DirectX library for the Windows operating system. DirectSound provides a low-latency interface to the sound card driver and can handle the mixing and recording of multiple audio streams.

Besides providing the essential service of passing audio data to the sound card, DirectSound provides other essential capabilities such as recording and mixing sound, adding effects to sound (e.g., reverb, echo, or flange), using hardware accelerated buffers, and positioning sounds in 3D space. DirectSound also provides a means to capture sounds from a microphone or other input and controlling capture effects during audio capture. [1]

After many years of development, today DirectSound is a mature API, and supplies many other useful capabilities, such as the ability to play multichannel sounds at high resolution. While DirectSound was designed to be used by games, today it is used to play audio in a large number of audio applications...


Windows Vista/Windows 7
Windows Vista once again features a completely re-written audio stack based on the Universal Audio Architecture. Because of the architectural changes in the redesigned audio stack, a direct path from DirectSound to the audio drivers does not exist. DirectSound and other APIs such as MME are emulated as WASAPI Session instances. DirectSound runs in emulation mode on the Microsoft software mixer. The emulator does not have hardware abstraction, so there is no hardware DirectSound acceleration, meaning hardware and software relying on DirectSound acceleration may have degraded performance. It's likely a supposed performance hit might not be noticeable, depending on the application and actual system hardware. In the case of hardware 3D audio effects played using DirectSound3D, they will not be playable; this also breaks compatibility with EAX extensions.

Third-party APIs such as ASIO and OpenAL are not affected by these architectural changes in Windows Vista, as they use IOCtl to interface directly with the audio driver . A solution for applications that wish to take advantage of hardware accelerated high-quality 3D positional audio is to use OpenAL. However, this only works if the manufacturer provides an OpenAL driver for their hardware.

As of 2007, a solution to re-enable hardware acceleration of DirectSound3D and Audio Effects, such as EAX, called Creative ALchemy was launched. Creative ALchemy intercepts calls to DirectSound3D and translates them into OpenAL calls to be processed by supported hardware such as Sound Blaster X-Fi and Sound Blaster Audigy. For software-based Creative audio solutions, ALchemy utilizes its built-in 3D audio engine without using OpenAL at all.

Realtek, a manufacturer of integrated HD audio codecs, has a product similar to ALchemy called 3D SoundBack. C-Media, a manufacturer of PC sound card chipsets, also has a solution called Xear3D EX, although it works instead by intercepting DirectSound3D calls transparently in the background without any user intervention.

So, how do companies produce games with environmental audio, 3D audio, etc? Does the CPU handle it now? Sound cards no longer needed? Sound cards completely obsolete? Sound cards should be burned at the stake?

Stay tuned!

[Rbstr]

Why is that whole thing necessary?


Does the CPU handle it now? Sound cards no longer needed?

Yes.
They haven't been needed since reasonable audio showed up on motherboards around the end of the Pentium 4. Since Vista and Core2-gen cpus they don't really even offer the marginal performance gains they used to.

Sound cards completely obsolete? Sound cards should be burned at the stake?

No.
If you want better recording quality, more flexible inputs and outputs or have lossless audio or something that makes higher quality playback worth while.
There's also the openAl thing...but go have a listen to BF3 or something and tell me having hardware acceleration for it matters.

[Traak]

So, I'm wondering. If someone wants a top-of-the-line experience in his games, with sound beautifully rendered, enemy positions easily trackable, and properly muffled so tanks don't sound like they are riding over top of you when they are 30 feet away through five concrete walls, what does one do?

LOL I would love to have the Sound Blaster just so I could modify my voice for the voice chat during combat:

http://www.creative.com/soundblaster/technology/voicefx/instructions1.html?TB_iframe=true&height=470&width=800&modal=true