Page 9 - Game Performance Cont'd

Games Cont'd

Battlefield 2

I would post a screenshot of BF2, but unfortunately it would be one of looking up at the sky.  I'll spare you.

Without a doubt BF2 is the new CS, minus the hacks, but with more bugs. It also has the best immersive sound of any game that I have ever played. I was very exited to use the X-Fi simply because this game supports it right out of the box. The X-Fi should only make it better, right? Well, there's a story about that

Many of the EAX features never really impressed me, but with the CMSS-3DHeadphone setting enabled, you get the most immersive sound experience yet in a video game. The effect encompasses you with a believable 3D field.  You can hear sounds all around you, front, sides, behind, above, and below. There are still some mixing issues that affect the immersion, but this is much better than Creative's past efforts. It is much better than the Sensaura3D 2.0, in my opinion, especially with the MacroFX.

To give you some sense of what I'm talking about, I first used to our reference Terratec DMX 6-fire with Sensaura3D. This setup provided a very transparent and accurate sound field. Then came the X-Fi with EAX HD 5.0. A game like BF2 makes situational awareness very important, which makes sound very important. With EAX and CMSS Headphone, it was easy to gauge which direction, height, and how far away a sniper shot was, thus making easy work to sneak up on the guy to knife or shock paddle for the big points.

Comparing EAX with and without CMSS, it was not possible to do the above without the CMSS. Without CMSS, just regular EAX, some sounds were reversed, like the engine sounds in tanks and buggies. If I'm not mistaken, engine sounds should come from where the engine actually is, in the back.  Other sounds, like reverb and ambient (turret whine), were not accurate either, by being too little.

With the CMSS-3DHeadphone setting, the game provides you with a lot more sound information and sucks you fully and completely into the game. The EAX features actually seem to work, providing occlusion, masking, and reflection, among all the other bits of reverb and crispy, detailed gun sounds. Did you notice that ejected shells will make different sounds depending on the ground texture? I didn't until the X-Fi.

Leave the CMSS-3DHeadphone on with BF2 and you'll be okay for this game.

**At the time of writing there is an issue with some maps and the X-Fi, causing performance problems.  We only found an issue with stuttering on the FuShe Pass map in Battlefield 2.

Doom3

Well, we all know the story about id and Creative. I'll let you Google it if you don't. Doom 3 has a pretty good sound system, so maybe the addition of EAX will make it better, too? The installation of the X-Fi installs the 1.3 Doom 3 patch  and the EAX patch.  There's not much difference between the basic Doom 3 sound and EAX 4, with or without the CMSS-3DHeadphone. EAX added reverb, in differing amounts, depending on the size of the room. That's neat. However it is not very realistic, including the dreaded, to me at least, I can hear footsteps through the concrete and steel airlock. That alone killed the immersion, so I just turned it off. I had more fun playing with the widescreen graphics options, honestly.

The cost of using EAX with Doom3 is thankfully minimal with the X-Fi.  Now, will the movie use EAX?

Counter-Strike : Source

Beautiful mayhem. We got qwn3d.

I'm beginning to think that the ability to hear footsteps through walls is another cheat for CS. With the X-Fi it was very easy to hear direction, distance, and vector of targets. And yes, Dorothy, through walls.

3DMark03 Pro

There's little denying that the X-Fi is very efficient with DirectSound compared to other cards.  The DMX 6-fire has some acceleration in its Envy24 chip,but it cannot match the X-Fi in any way, shape, or form.

In summary, Creative has done a lot to get developers to use EAX. However, even when a developer uses the EAX technology, or even the X-RAM, it is still hit or miss. Most of the time, the default sound system works very well, and occasionally, better than EAX.  Battlefield 2 is an excellent case of where the developers took great care with the audio and the results are very impressive and immersive with or without EAX. Benchmarks can be run to view the impact of the software renderer verses the hardware acceleration, but this does not tell you about how well the effects work with the game. Sometimes the EAX and X-Fi will work great to increase the immersion into the game world, and other times not. Just let your ears decide and enable/disable EAX to fit.