Auzentech X-Meridian 7.1 review

Soundcards and Speakers 106 Page 6 of 14 Published by

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Page 6 - Benchmarks Battlefield 2142

Performance GAMES!

 

Battlefield 2142

 

Brutal Overwhelming Force

Ouch.  Give that boy a napkin.

 

This game is not the pinnacle of flawless design.  It is rather fun to play, though.  What BF2142 does offer for us sound geeks, is an ultra audio mode with 128 voices.  When you start the game, the X-Mer is detected as an X-Fi , which is hilarious.  The X-Mer does not have the Enhanced HD EAX effects, and will cause BF2142 to act strange.  But, the X-meridian does do EAX 2.0, which is good enough for BF2142 and it runs like that anyway.

 

For consistency during testing, we set BF2142 on the medium, 32-voice setting.  These are results of at least 10 60-second runs averaged, on a full 64-person Berlin-only server.

 

Battlefield 2

 

What we see is obvious: the X-Fi is teh winnar.  The plucky nForce 4 APU is cranking along about 12% behind, and the X-Meridian is plodding along in third place, more than 16% behind X-Fi.  But, because of a driver limitation, it appears that the nForce 4 does not process more than 16 voices, while the X-Meridian is at 32 voice level.  This means that if it could run at 32-voice, the X-Meridian would be faster than the nForce 4 APU.  Dont you just love mathematics?

 

In the Ultra 128-voice mode, the X-Meridian was about 13% slower than the X-Fi, which is itself more than 30% off its 32-voice score.  Naturally, the 128 voice mode was barely playable on this test machine with framerates chopped nearly in half.

 

Sound quality wise, the worst was the nForce4, with a strange mix of far and near sounds (hm, sounds like an EAX problem, don't it?), and there was quite a lot of missing sounds like footsteps, wind, and that awful hiss you hear just before the grenade explodes.  We did hear a bit of crackle on some voices (like general infantry) with the X-Meridian in Ultra 128-voice mode.  It may be a driver issue, or a BF2142 issue, or this rig just ain't fast enough.  All in all, not bad performance for a sound card in a game designed for a competitor.

 

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