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X-Fi and the Elite Pro: SoundBlaster's Return to Greatness

 by Derek Wilson on August 30, 2005 11:59 AM EST
110 Comments | Add A Comment
110 Comments

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.

RightMark 3DSound 2.0 No Sound

RightMark 3DSound 2.0 32 Buffers

RightMark 3DSound 2.0 60 Buffers

RightMark 3DSound 2.0 127 Buffers


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.

Battlefield 2 Performance No Sound

Battlefield 2 Performance High Quality

Battlefield 2 Performance Ultra High Quality

We'd really like to see such an expensive audio solution offer nearly equal performance compared to running without sound; at present, both the Audigy 4 Pro and X-Fi take a 15% peformance hit when switching to high quality audio. That may come with future titles and updated drivers, but for now the X-Fi is no better than the existing cards at reducing CPU overhead. Quantitatively, X-Fi should be the better card, and the 1% or less difference in CPU load isn't a big deal. In current games, it's tough to notice a difference.

Quantitative Analysis: RMAA 24-bit / 96 kHz Qualitative Analysis: Audio Listening
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  • DerekWilson - Wednesday, August 31, 2005 - link

    we'll try it

  • Reflex - Wednesday, August 31, 2005 - link

    Well said, SDA. And yes, I also appreciate the maturity of AT editors. I do feel a disclaimer needs to be added to the article, that said they could easily have overreacted(as THG editors tend to).

  • Reflex - Wednesday, August 31, 2005 - link

    Derek - The concern I have is that your review, as it stands, is a ringing endorsement for a product in a market you do not fully understand. The users who rely upon Anandtech as their only source for this type of reccomendation are likely to purchase something like this, even though there are a wide variety of competitive solutions out there for a quarter of the price. I feel you should at the least post a disclaimer that your audio review process is a work in progress and make it very clear that you do not fully understand the market that the X-Fi is being marketed to, nor have adequate experience with competitive audio solutions.

    More damaging, from my perspective, is the fact that Creative has not pledged to support future standards or alternative OS's. On a $400 product it should not be obsolete in the 14 months between today and the release of Windows Vista. You need to at the least get a solid statement on whether or not the X-Fi will support the new audio standard natively, or if they intend to only support it in legacy interfaces. This is a sound card, not a video card, a user should not expect to have to upgrade in a little over a year.

  • PenGun - Tuesday, August 30, 2005 - link

    Try an M-Audio Audiophile 24/96. I used to run a TB Pinnacle which seriously kicked ass on all creative products including all the audigys I ran into.

    The M-Audio Audiphile is better. A very sweet card pushing the limits of what is possible with a switching power supply.

    After what creative did to Carmack there is no way I will ever buy their stuff again. As they continually make crap as far as I can tell, it's no problem.

    My card goes directly to Kimber braided, RCAs on the Audiophile, then to my Sonic Frontier's factory modded (mostly voltage control cicuits) SFL-1 Signiture preamp. From there we go to a pair of SFM-75 monoblocks, again not stock, running Svetlyna 6550B power tubes. That goes, biwired, on Tara Time and Space cables to a pair of BMW Matrix 1 speakers.

    I do have a revealing system eh' ;).

    PenGun

  • Eskimooo - Tuesday, August 30, 2005 - link

    would that be any good for games, too?

  • PenGun - Tuesday, August 30, 2005 - link

    It's pretty awesome actually. No hardware acceleration of course, but it's not a problem on my new Athy 64.

    PenGun

  • Eskimooo - Wednesday, August 31, 2005 - link

    hold on, no non-Cretaive card does EAX 3,4,5 at present...So it may sound awesome but you do not get max out of the game
    Does this card produce surround sound over the headphones? Call it gimmicks, but I'd be much interested in that. For practical space reasons and occasional nite gaming.

  • PenGun - Wednesday, August 31, 2005 - link

    Sound is what I care about. Positional audio in games is really not much more use than stereo. We can meet somewhere and see who walks away ... ;). Nexuiz is open source Quake,Quake2,Quake3 on steroids. Fun is back in deathmatch.

    I wonder why my account disapeared, I just recreated it but that is kinda strange.

    PenGun

  • blckgrffn - Tuesday, August 30, 2005 - link

    Where is it, dammit?!?!

    I guess I was unaware that the Intel solution had this ability. It may make sense to get a board featuring this ability to hook it up to my receiver, I can't believe creative can't figure out that we would really like to hook up a high quality card via a digital cable...

  • segagenesis - Tuesday, August 30, 2005 - link

    This is exactly why I got the HDA X-Mystique 7.1. I believe it is a licensing issue that Creative does not wish to bother with, or does not care to bother with. It's not a perfect card (minor control panel issues) but it does exactly what I want, and has great audio qualiy.

    It may not be as super ultra quality as this new card, but I would rather enjoy the fact it has DD 5.1 Live. The review kind of says it anyways, he mentions that using existing hardware compared... *ahem* this new "extreme" sound card doesnt really make an audible difference. If your onboard 5.1 sounds ok to you, why even bother upgrading?

    One thing that I find troubling is that game performance is slightly less with the X-Fi and considering Creative's lack of promtness with driver updates I would feel worried about optimizations.

    The last Creative card I owned was a SBLive! 5.1 and I don't really miss the brand.
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