X-Fi and the Elite Pro: SoundBlaster's Return to Greatness
by Derek Wilson on August 30, 2005 11:59 AM EST- Posted in
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Performance and Quality: Game Tests
For these tests, we will be looking at RightMark 3DSound 2.0 and Battlefield 2. With the possibility of twice the number of voices supported by Audigy, we can't do a direct comparison at some points. However, we will see how much impact going from 62 to 127 voices can have.Our test system included these components:
NVIDIA nForce 4 based motherboard
AMD Athlon 64 FX-55
1GB DDR400 2:2:2:8 RAM
NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GTX
120GB Seagate 7200.7 HD
Our RightMark tests show that the Audigy 4 Pro uses less CPU power per setting than the X-Fi. This was a little confusing at first, but we have our thoughts on why this happens. It seems to make sense to us that the X-Fi driver is more complicated than the Audigy driver. We therefore see slightly lower performance from the X-Fi card. With the X-Fi being brand new, driver improvements could also change the performance picture over time.
This performance issue should be different on the higher end X-Fi cards with games that support X-RAM. Unfortunately, we can't test this yet as no games we looked at have this ability. Storing uncompressed audio and not needing to run an MP3 or Ogg decoder in the background would help to significantly lighten the CPU load on most games. Note also how CPU usage increases nearly linearly with the number of voices used.
For Battlefield 2, we ran our usual test at medium quality settings at 1024x768. The Ultra High quality option in Battlefield 2 is only accessible with an X-Fi card (which likely means it employs more than 62 voices). As we can see, BF2 performance is consistent with our RightMark numbers. The X-Fi gives us just a little lower performance than the Audigy. It is nice to see that going from High Quality to Ultra High Quality on the X-Fi doesn't incur a significant performance penalty though.
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tayhimself - Tuesday, August 30, 2005 - link
XTREME Yawn!!It is Xtreme Fidelity with Xcellent Xquality for XTREME music and XTREME gameZ!!!!
No thanks! When will this XTREMEly stupid marketing stop??
I'm still using the nforce2 soundforge because my audigy didnt ship with Creative Mediasource which allows output of music to 5.1. Newer Audigys did ship with MediaSource and could handle 5.1 music output just fine. Needless to say I am XTREMEly pissed and creative and wont be buying something from them again.
Googer - Thursday, September 1, 2005 - link
http://sonicfocus.com/help/help_page.html">http://sonicfocus.com/help/help_page.htmldejerez - Wednesday, August 31, 2005 - link
media source is available for download from creative site. It is a few files all together but this software is for free if you have Audigy. 5.1. upmix option is not in media source but in the card settings that install with the drivers. I had Audigy and used Playcenter and than upgraded for free to Media Source. No problem. I used Audigy with tweaked driver for Audigy 2 to get more features and then eventually bought Audigy 2 ZS and used that with Software availble from their site. I had no problem with an upmix option. I cannot see your point here. Which version of the card do you have?flexy - Tuesday, August 30, 2005 - link
yeah those "extreme gamez" are actually just TWO, namely doom3 and bf2..which (i THINK) support x-fi....if at all. Was not clear in the review. The point is that they even said they did not hear ANY diff between this and "older" hardware.....I think it's ironic that (at elast for gaming and occasional music listening) a $42 Audigy 2 OEM (which has 5.1 output btw) is AS GOOD as a card 10x the money.....and, in all honesty, i do NOT think that my ears are good enough to "notice" a 4db better SNR ratio or similiar nonsense....not to mention someone would have a hard time selling me this card :)
DerekWilson - Wednesday, August 31, 2005 - link
The coloration from the poor frequency response and IMD sweep at 16-bit 44.1kHz really deadens cd auido and mp3s on the Audigy 2 line. Its not about a slightly worse SNR or a little less dynamic range. It's about poor sound reproduction and bad sample rate conversion.Of course, gamers won't care as much about this problem. And we can help get around some of the issues by bypassing windows kernel mixer on Audigy hardware.
I wouldn't buy an X-Fi Elite Pro either. The price point is hard to swallow.
dejerez - Wednesday, August 31, 2005 - link
Sample rate conversion does not seem to be an issue any more, right?X-fi audio processor has SRC engine that converts to and from any resolution at 136dB THD+N. Check the review on digit-life. They say
"Judging from our measurements, the problem with a lot of distortions is a thing of the past now. The 44.1 kHz mode in X-Fi cards is no different from 48 kHz"
They also compared the quality of the new hardware SRC X-Fi vs the wide-spread real-time SSRC WinAmp plug-in, "notable for its relatively high quality and decent CPU load"
They conclided by saying
SRC of the X-Fi outperforms the SSRC plug-in and it causes no distortions - audible or visible on the diagram.
xpose - Tuesday, August 30, 2005 - link
i was so close to first :(vijay333 - Tuesday, August 30, 2005 - link
Thanks for the review. Was looking into maybe getting one of these soon but I'll stick with onboard for a while until I get one of the Audigy boards.InuYasha - Tuesday, August 30, 2005 - link
first!Phantronius - Tuesday, August 30, 2005 - link
1st!!! Yes!!!Seriously, looks like I have no reason to part with my Audigy 2 quit yet.