Sound Blaster X-Fi Titanium HD review

Soundcards and Speakers 106 Page 9 of 12 Published by

teaser

Electronics Overview

 

Electronics Overview

We have always added these sections to our reviews to help people understand what they are buying when they slap down their hard earned audio dollars.  Soundcards can look very similar to each other but can sound drastically different.  This is mainly due to the component choices made by the cards designers. 

In the next section, we will attempt to give you a better idea of what the individual components offer and a brief note about their quality.

Creative Labs SB X-Fi Titanium HD

From a design and electronics point of view that is some nice audio tech.  We need to take a closer look though and see what we are paying for here.

DSP and X-Ram

The 20KX series DSP also known as the X-Fi Processor easily has to be one of the most powerful digital signal processors ever seen on any soundcard.

Creative Labs SB X-Fi Titanium HD

The X-Fi DSP, is built on the ring architecture with 4096 audio channels which is further broken down into 5 internal units along the ring.  We have, the SRC engine, Tank, Filter, mixer and DSP.

X-Ram, There seems to be a great deal of misconception regarding the function of X-Ram and if it is even used in games.  The X-Ram can perform any number of features from allowing the DSP to decode compressed audio or acts as a cache or storage for in game sounds.

Games actually started using lower quality samples and heavy compressions because the audio hardware did not have the power to use high quality samples.  Newer cards and X-RAM were aimed at allowing game houses to use high quality samples by using the X-RAM for buffering, caching, storage or pre-decoding.

Creative Labs SB X-Fi Titanium HD

It should also be noted that games using the OpenAL audio routines will use X-Ram by default.  The exact operation of the X-Fi DSP is a bit outside the scope of this review but we would recommend you read up on this chip if you are planning on buying a card that utilizes it.

 Creative Labs SB X-Fi Titanium HD

Share this content
Twitter Facebook Reddit WhatsApp Email Print