Page 10 - Performance Games

Performance - Games
Of course the best part of reviewing sound cards is that we get to play some games! As we know, the M2G does not have hardware acceleration for gaming, but the results were more interesting than that. Halo, for instance, would not enable EAX, but UT2K4 would.  We did run tests on UT2K4, but decided that it is not a very good benchmark for sound cards, as sounds would routinely disappear as the action intensified.

Halo

Halo has a very good benchmark, run halo.exe -timedemo from the XP CLI.  Funny thing about Halo was an issue in enabling EAX, which it would not do with Gainward's Music2Go. The other games here had no issues, but perhaps it is an issue with the Music2Go's Sensaura3D in the driver. Objectively, the sound was fine, but not the best we've heard. I believe the DMX 6-fire put on a good sound show with Halo, with sounds being very crisp and clear.

Call of Duty

CoD has the best game sounds I've ever experienced.  Using the redsquare1 map, and a very well worn path through the mayhem, we counted the frames with FRAPS. The Music2Go did well, but some sounds were displaced, like footsteps, and incoming mortar shells.  They were too distant at times, and the whizzing bullets did not pop out like they did on the DMX 6-fire, but the directional cues for both cards were excellent.

Far Cry

We used the second save point in the training portion of the retail game, where we get to experience both indoor and outdoors areas.  The audio settings were "surround" sound with hardware mixing and doppler. The Music2Go did well, but the sound lagged by at least half a second. Disabling the doppler effect cured the problem, but significantly reduced realism. The DMX 6-fire in Sensaura mode had little delay to the sounds with full acceleration and exceptional realism.

For gamers, it is clear that the Music2Go is not ideal. It is faster than the DMX 6-fire, but it is also not doing as much work.