Onboard Audio On Performance

[Ebisoba]

How much does an onboard audio affects PC performance especially in games? I have an AC97 compliant onboard chip. Thanks.

[Scott Tiger]

I doubt much. My understanding is than a machine with a 1ghz processor or better perform any differently with onboard sound or a sound card.

Most games require your video card do a lot more work than the processor does as well so the games performance is more dependant on the power of the vid card than the cpu speed.

EDIT:

You will get better sounding games with a sound card though, esp if you're playing a newer game that supports EAX and you have a soundcard that supports it as well. Highly recommended!

[Peter M]

AC97 is just the bus for the sound data. Entirely software driven solutions use it, and so do top end solutions like Creative Audigy or M-Audio 8-channel stuff.

The question is, how much of its own brain does the audio engine IN FRONT OF the AC97 bus have?

Now, chipset sound engines. Intel, most SiS chipsets and older VIA chipsets have a rather stupid, CPU driven one. VIA's current ones as well as ALi's are more capable.

The in/out capabilities (number of channels, digital in/out etc.) then again depend on the codec that's AT THE END OF the AC97 bus. There are six- and even eight-channel codecs that do everything.

Will say, there is no generic answer to "how good is AC97 sound?" - much like there is no answer to "Hof fast is an AGP graphics card?"

[Ebisoba]

I have the Ali's AliMagik chipset. I'm using the default WinXP Pro driver. Athlon XP 1600+. So how do I figure the amount of resource it hogs? I want to know if buying a separate card will boost game performance by a decent amount.

[skuz]

There was a good article about that at www.tomshardware.com some time ago. Of course they couldn't test all onboard sound chipsets, but that gives an idea.

[Tomteriffic]

Your mileage may vary, of course, but on an SiS chipset board I have, I disabled the onboard AC-97 and put in a Turtle Beach Santa Cruz. I ran some benchmarks before and after and my overall system perfomance improved about 3.4%, as an average.

[sKiT]

I use my onboard audio(AC97' based) only at LAN parties and in playing BF1942 I can tell you I see a definite loss of performance on my system....somewhere around a loss of 12-25 FPS and sometimes more depending on whats going on in-game. My system is a Soyo Dragon KT-333 Platinum mainboard paired with 768MB of PC2100 DDR and an AMD AthlonXP 2100+(1.753GHz clock) and a GF3 64MB vid card. Onboard audio takes up valuable cycles from your CPU no matter how powerful your CPU is. At home with my GTXP external sound card, I get total performance back.