Page 7 - Games

GAMES!!!

A variety of games were tested with the HDA X-Plosion 7.1 DST-Connect in its variety of modes, 5.1 analog, with DD Live, and with DTS.  Also included with the raw numbers is a little subjective impression of each game with the various modes.  Screen resolutions are limited to 1024x768, to remove the video card as a bottleneck.

I used FRAPS 2.7.4 to count frames, and followed a strict list of activities in-game.   A pretty reliable set of numbers was produced by averaging at least three runs each, as is seen below.

F.E.A.R.

Well, not too clear, but I just pwnd that guy.

FEAR is rather good at upsetting the FRAPS counts by the rather good AI used by the game.  This randomness can be counteracted somewhat by increasing test time, so I upped it to two minutes (110 to 120 seconds) for each run.  I used the maximum sound settings, with as many check boxes as possible in the sounds options menu.

Sorry for the extra-large graphs... blame it on Excel.

Nice.  Not bad for the X-Plosion and quite playable, too, but it still is the slowest in the bunch.  And how does it affect the FPS with different encoding methods?  Glad you asked.

What we see is that the different encoding methods dont seem to affect the framerate very much at all with the X-Plosion.  This is excellent, and what we would expect to see with a hardware encoding solution.  Subjectively, of the encoding modes, I actually preferred the DD Live to the DTS.  It seemed to give a better sense of distance and direction than the DTS.  The lack of EAX was very prominent here, especially since even the nForce 4 showed off some EAX effects.

Oregon Trail

Thats right sweetheart, I said Oregon Trail.  I dunno, call me old fashioned.  For some reason FRAPS wasnt able to grab framerates for OT, and I really did try, probably due to the games lack of 3D.  Well, FRAPS is outand please forgive the lack of a graphIll just have to use something else.  Relying on my good old eyes, the game did not seem to be dropping any frames, nor did it seem to even seem slow at all with any encoding mode the X-Plosion was set to.

Subjectively speaking, and I can see your eyes rolling, the X-Plosion did have a grainy sounding MIDI output.  But, it is hard to fault Auzentech for this transgression, because it uses the Microsoft GS Wavetable SW Synth that comes standard with Windows XP.  The X-Fi was a little better, which uses its own MIDI library, but you could still hear some grain.  The songs that play when youre at a landmark sound pretty good too.