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Benchmarking:
First, a little note on our benchmarks
before we continue. For the sake of comparison, we used
the NVIDIA SoundStorm based integrated audio on the DFI
LANPARTY NFII Ultra motherboard throughout our testing. In this particular
setup, the DFI motherboard uses the
ALC-650 codec to output the sound. All game and 3D tests were run at a
resolution of 640x480x32 to isolate CPU performance as much
as possible, and to show how many of those CPU cycles
were being eaten by the audio reproduction.
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Test
Setup |
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A Well Oiled Machine |
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Motherboard:
DFI LANPARTY NFII Ultra
Motherboard
Common
Hardware and Software:
AMD 2800+ Athlon XP Barton
Processor 333MHz FSB
2 x 256MB Kingston HyperX
PC3500 Memory
AOpen Aeolus FX5600S 256MB
(Drivers - v.53.03 WHQL)
Seagate 40GB ATA-100
7200RPM Hard Drive
On-Board Sound
- NVIDIA SoundStorm
MAD DOG
Entertainer 7.1 DSP
Windows XP Professional w/ SP1
DirectX 9.0b
NVIDIA Unified Driver
Package v3.13
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Audio Winbench 99 |
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CPU Utilization |
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For our first benchmark scores we used Veritest's
Audio Winbench 99, which tests the sound card's CPU
utilization at different frequencies and bit rates using
DirectSound and DirectSound3D.
From the chart above we can
see that the MAD DOG Entertainer sound card uses more CPU cycles than its counterpart. The
biggest differences were at the 16-bit, where the MAD DOG
card used more than twice as much CPU horsepower. Of course,
we'd like to see CPU utilization be as low as possible from the audio subsystem, and though the
MAD DOG did finish quite a bit higher than NVIDIA's
SoundStorm audio, we are still only looking at
under 4% CPU utilization which isn't a significant amount for
today's CPU's.
Aquamark 3 & Comanche 4 |