the reason creative cards don't support DD Encoding is because Dolby requires you to acquire a license for the technology, which would make any audio card even more expensive for no real beneficial reason..

I have an nForce2 SoundStorm system with SPDIF Dolby Digital out, and used to be a SoundBlaster Live! owner. To be absolutely honest, nVidia dropped the ball with SoundStorm - its drivers are pathetic. Every release of nForce2 drivers has issues, and the sound isn't as good as what it could be. Spatial seperation is worse on the SoundStorm compared to my old Live! (and I have THX certified speaker system), game surround sound isn't as clear or as realistic as on my Live!. Basically, ever since I got my nForce2, I've been missing out on good sound which used to come from my Live!

And dont get me started on alternative OS driver support :-(

Sorry pal. I usually agree with you, but not on this "Soundstorm is dead. Get over it." statement

Yeah. K. Sure dude.

Maybe Soundstorm would not have faired well in this test. Fine. Maybe it would have. That's fine too. But it's worth testing, if for no other reasons than the large install-base of NF2 & AthlonXP systems in the community, and the cost for the hardware relative to other platforms.

Whether you think it is dead or not is your opinon, and that's okay, but the community will decide for themselves when hardware is dead, and when it is not.

I wanted a 3500+ S939 system. But the reality is that for the price of the CPU on its own, I bought my Shuttle SN41G2B V2.0, an AthlonXP 2500+ and 1GB of low-latency HyperX PC2700 RAM on discount. Dead? No, I highly doubt that, Diss. Get over it.

Geoff, your comments on Soundstorm are arrogant and bigoted. You used a SoundBlaster Live! to test with which is far older. The Herculese Muse 5.1 is around the same age, as is the Fortissimo line. As others said, starting with an Athlon XP 3200+ wouldn't have been a bad solution. I can understand your real reasoning for not doing so after reading some of your comments, but the words used in your article were flat-out insulting, displaying a "shoot-your-mouth-off" attitude.

Many of us are using that "dated SoundStorm/Nforce2/Athlon XP" platform, we're not all made of money, and we want to know how our current system does, not necessarily something we don't have or cannot afford. In the future, when you want to talk, I suggest you use the brain part that connects your gut with your tongue before you type out an article.

I've been using the Creative 'SoundBlaster' since almost the first model back on my old 386sx 16Mhz Modo! Since then each new one has always been good.

I don't know much about audio, but why has Creative gotten such a bad rep??? I've just updated to a AMD64 and got an Audigy ZS, in my option great sound... What am I missing???

I remeber reading something about voltages on the output audio ports? Are there other problems? or do other cards just offer better value for money?

Note to SoundStorm fanboys: Yes, I'm aware I didn't test with your beloved SoundStorm. Because SoundStorm requires a dated Athlon XP/nForce2 platform, I left it out of this comparison. As far as current Athlon 64 platforms are concerned, SoundStorm is dead. Get over it.

As someone who just got one of these about 2 weeks ago, as an upgrade from my KT333A, that cut deep, Diss. Really deep. To the bone.

Now, I won't whine about lit like some of these other guys, but it still hurts inside...

Someone. Someone please save us! Someone else start making sound cards... I'm drowning... AAAaaaahhhh!

SB Live Comment

In the comparison you said that the SB Live only supports 4 speaker output... this isn't correct. The higher end original SB Lives support 5.1 (X-Gamer, Platinum, etc)... I know this because I'm using one with a digital out to 5.1 right now =)

My friend has a Soundstorm board (NVAPU). It has some issues with 3d audio in games due to marginal drivers from NV. Sounds go to the wrong speakers, horrible popping, etc. I think NV has ditched the APU honestly and basically stopped driver development.

Also, Soundstorm isn't what you guys are all raving about. It's related. The NVAPU is what it's all about. Soundstorm is a NV standard for boards with the APU to match up to. It's optional.

Hell, some people think they have "soundstorm" when they actually are using the Realtek codec (or whatever AC97 codec is on the board). You MUST HAVE A MCP-T or MCP-D to have the APU. With out that dashed letter you have the AC97 audio (like I do). You can also find out in the NV Mixer.

Heh, EAX is just a bunch of different ways to say reverb. DS3D does almost all of the positional audio.

Heh, believe it or not, the SBLive (EMU10K1) can be a 7.1 card. The drivers don't let you do it (like they don't let you access things like the card's parametric equalizer.) That DSP on there is totally programmable to do tons of stuff. The functionality was never really explored to keep the opportunity for "new technology" (Audigy say), which means they wanted more business opportunities than to push their current tech to the limit.

Go check out the KX Project. Heck, I'd like to see the card benchmarked with the KX drivers (though the KX project isn't about gaming, it does lack some advanced gaming-stuff support..I think it still does hardware DS3D) KX drivers support Live thru Audigy 2.

One nifty thing the KX drivers let you do is reverse the front/back jack. The back jack has a significantly better DAC so if you switch them you can get better front quality (or headphone quality) without screwing up multichannel sound.

And, the KX project lets you program the card's DSP using a object-based visual system. STUNNINGLY powerful idea. Want a 10-step equalizer on your "little" Live? You can have one.

Repost from a related thread:

I dunno what you guys are on about. The Asus A7N8X mated the nForce2 APU to a crappy DAC to produce mediocre sound quality:

http://techreport.com/reviews/2003q1/shuttle-sn41g2/index.x?pg=6

Listen to various audio implementations side by side, and the reality becomes very clear. Sure, the nForce2 APU's DSP units were nice for performance, but the audio itself was typically not very good. Fear the crab!

:)

All I'm saying is it'd be interesting if Diss could compare an Audigy/2 and a Soundstorm in both 5 and 2 channel modes. That's just two sound cards, two tests each. I don't need to see a gajillion sound cards on an aging AXP platform, but I'd be interested in how Soundstorm stacks up to the fastest--and really only--gaming sound card in the market.

C'mon, Diss, make me rue passing up that $80AR Audigy 2 ZS Gamer's Edition. =^)

I'd really like to see how an Aureal Vortex 2 sound card holds up. Call it dead if you want, but it's held its own in hardware acceleration vs the Audigys (Audigies?) in previous tests. You have one lying around, Diss?

dunno what you guys are on about. The Asus A7N8X mated the nForce2 APU to a crappy DAC to produce mediocre sound quality:

S/PDIF out.

Hey guys, take it easy on Diss. I think in this case, most of us would agree that it would have been better for him to run a 3200+/Soundstorm motherboard from the start, so that the soundstorm argument would never have existed.

However, he chose to do the review his way, so take the results for what they are worth. He still has the cards, so he could always kill half a day running them all again in a 3200+/Soundstorm motherboard if he wanted to, but I am sure that his time is limited.

Diss, thanks for another good review. You should have known better then to stir up the fanboys, no matter WHOSE fans they are. (Soundstorm, Creative, TBSC, etc...) :)

P.S. All Soundstorm users suck.

<<ME RUNS AWAYS>

As far as current Athlon 64 platforms are concerned, SoundStorm is dead. Get over it.)

You had to use Athlon 64? Only?

Because SoundStorm requires a dated Athlon XP/nForce2 platform

Yea and you included a dated Creative SoundBlaster Live! Not that there aren't a number of people still using it.

Half the review is with Creative sound cards and the only other sound card with a DSP is the Hercules Fortissimo III 7.1. Just so happens I have two of those sound cards lying around because both my PCs use SoundStorm. Also the driver updates stopped at version 6.09 date 2003-02-28. This maybe because the Crystal sound chips are discontinued.

One Cmedia based sound card and the rest are based on Via audio chips. All which don't have a DSP. Of course cmedia is crap. I've owned a Soyo Dragon with that sound chip.

Not any of your fault the sound cards sucked but SoundStorm seemed very important to included. I don't think the benchmarks would have been very different if you ran them on a Athlon XP based system.

If you don't have SoundStorm the review is owned by Creative.

Nforce 4 is coming with Soundstorm 2 so testing on a XP3200 nf2 board could have given people some idea of performance.

Still... pants to you SOUNDSTORM LIVES!!!

/crai's

Not to be a troll or anything, but this benchmark wasn't really that useful and the results were pretty obivious. Creative leads the gaming performance pack yet again for how many years counting? Well I didn't see that coming.

CPU hits from audio utilliztion are being more and more meanless, if it already is with the latest generation of CPUs. Games demand a beefy GPU far more then a faster audio sub-system. Audio fidelity, quality and 3D audio impedmention takes over as priorities at that point.

I need to comment on this too , as owner for 2 two nForce2 systems and reseller of ASUS A7n8X-deluxe and A7n8x-e deluxe i can with laugh say to u that customers buy 64bit vs 32bit at rate approx 1:7.
No not because of speed, but because of price/performance, it's easier buy machine with mobile Barton 2600+ / 2800+ / 3000+ with nForce2 board including SoundStorm than waste 3 times more cash at 64bit CPU with similar results (ah i guess i not mentioned all these mobile CPUs runs fine at 3200-3800+ w/o special cooling). Be sure it can outperform any slower 64bit CPU in 32bit computing part.

so welcome to real world , btw. if i recommend audio card to 64bit CPU, it will be PCIe model and not outdated PCI model (max 64bit PCI, but so far i'm not aware of mainboard with PCIe and PCI-X at once).

so this test w/o
SoundStorm
Terratec Aureon 5.1 and 7.1 models
and many other is just show down of Creative ...

owned :)

So I'll lose 2 FPS playing Source on my integrated Soundstorm 6-channel sound that'll be running in stereo mode anyways. Pffft. Let's get gaming already!!!!!!

I haven't had any driver issues with Creative cards since they switched to the unified architecture a couple years ago (revision .253 IIRC). My Audigy2 ZS is a very solid card and sounds lovely paired up with Klipsch Promedia 5.1 Ultras :)

And yes, Soundstorm will be returning with the nForce4 chipset with updated features to boot.

I assume that Id made Doom 3's sound 100% CPU because they felt that EAX, etc, was going about it the wrong way (or at least not the way Id wanted their sound to be).

I would really like to see this test repeated on an nForce2 AXP system. The SoundStorm on nForce2 has earlier proven to be very good for hardware audio acceleration and if you repeat the test with all sound cards, I'm sure SoundStorm integrated audio will nto end up last.

nForce2 is a very common platform among us enthusiasts and I'm sure a lot of people reading this has nForce2 and are curious to its performance as it likely offsets the AXP disadvantage some.

Thanks for looking into this!

Looks like I'm going to have to pick up one of those Audigy 2 cards after seeing how bad my onboard sound really performed (The 11fps difference between sound and -nosound on my rig was a big much)

If I may ask, what questions did you guys ask Valve?

What's the difference between no hardware acceleration and software-emulated hardware acceleration? Given that something can either run in software, or be accelerated by hardware, I don't see much point in running it with software and then pretending that it's hardware...

Being one of those poor ignorant fools who thought he'd get real 24bit audio from an original Audigy when it came out, a victim of the willful campaign of misinformation perpetrated by Creative, I find myself nonetheless pleasantly surprised that my old card at least doesn't suck perf from games running on this new engine.

Hopefully the upgrade I recently gave my computer will give it enough balls to run HL2 decently:-)

I would love to see some investigation into the performance hit or benefit of enabling HARDWARE MIXING in various games on various cards on various cpus.

For example, I have an Audigy ZS in a Athlon64 3400+ box. I often wonder if I should enable hardware sound mixing and use the sound board or if it in fact would be faster to allow me cpu to do the hardware mixing.

The results could be surprising (for example, on my old athlon 1.4ghz rig with soundblaster live, the cpu was actually generally faster at doing the sound mixing than the old card was).

And once again, not a Turtle Beach anything in the lot. :\

soundstorm forever
it lives on in all of us