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Gaming!

Of course I used a few games to test the Audigy 4 Pro gaming competency. Creative has paid a lot of attention to us, the gaming mob, with its EAX 4.0 and Advanced HD so I expected it to kick even more ass here. 

Lord of the Rings - Battle for Midle Earth

This title makes use of EAX 3.0 and it is ridiculous fun from a gaming point of view. At first EAX3 could not be selected in-game, which reminded me of an old Audigy bug (it's still there!?). If you listen to a MP3 and in my case enable an EAX setting afterwards you need to disable that setting again. Otherwise in games EAX simply does not function properly. We're in 2005, Creative is that really necessary? Duh! Anyway, after a 2 minute cool down period I started playing the game, EAX works like a charm, deep and rich environmental sounds there's pretty much nothing like that among the competition. I tell you once you see the eye of Mordor over that battlefield while creeping at the left behind you hear the voice: "I see you". You'd almost forgive Creative that unfixed EAX bug. Okay enough of that ;) Seriously, it's one spectectular sound experience. Sounds ARE everywhere at the highest possible audio quality. I love this game and the Audigy complements that experience for sure.

Battlefield - VietnamHubba hubba come to poppa... Once again we can enable EAX 3.0 and it is fantastic. True story: so I load up a single player game. In the filed I grab a jeep. Hilbert like's the sound, so he increases volume. Now with sound already way too high another player merges into the jeep and takes control of a gun and starts firing. The guy is positioned at the left behind you. When he fired that gun I though I was going deaf on my left ear, so friggin loud. It's the truth though. When someone fires a gun next to you the sound will be tremendous. The same happened here. This is what positional sound is all about. Sounds at the right place, volume and effect at the right time. In BF Vietnam everything is right. The game sounds for some reason are not as 'clear' as they should be, the spectrum could be wider, it seems a little synthetic with the 3D engine sound. I blame it on the programmers though. They however make up for it with the bitching soundtrack, totally friggin awesome.

Medal of Honor - Pacific Assault
The last title I tried was Medal of Honor Pacific Assault (our review here). Sweet mamma, that game is good huh? From a graphics, gameplay and sound point of view this has to be one of the best titles to date. Configuring the game we again notice we can enable EAX 3.0. Clearly 4.0 is not widely supported just yet. I'm going to be short, sound is fantastic. Everything from just blowing stuff up, shooting and even the voices is just perfect. You are in the middle of a sound experience that is just breathtaking. You gotta have at the very least a 5.1 setup though!

Call of Duty
Call of Duty is one more game that allows really awesome environmental sound. Since this is an older title it is not CPU limited. e.g. your graphics card probably can render this game faster then the CPU can handle. Therefore it makes it an excellent little test to look at the soundcard versus its CPU dependency. Soundcards DO have an effect on your framerate. The less CPU calculations it requires the more is left over for the graphics card and thus that will in/decrease the framerate.

I took an Audigy 2 and ran some tests, then I used the integrated VIA Envy 24 solution to look at FPS behaviour and then of course we did the same tests with the Audigy 4. Look at the results (numbers are the average frames per second, higher is better).

Suffice to say is that all solutions are quite close to each other. The differences among all them can easily be explained to system anomalies. Quite frankly I did not expect the they VIA Envy to perform that good. The Audigy's win though, although only marginally.

Oh don't let me forget a few RMAA results in here. A totally geekish benchmark. The software spots and measures if the soundcard is producing what it is supposed to do. I'm not really into this benchmark as Brann is though. I'm more of a "if you can't hear it why bother" kind of guy (10 more audiophiles just picked up a gun and are aiming at me !!!). Our test system is loaded with hardware btw, it's noisy hell, which you'll still not be able to hear though.