Posted: December 6, 2001
Written by: Adam Honek

Performance

We used ZDnet Audio Winbench 99 for evaluating the Sound Blaster Audigy's efficiency.

Creative makes brave claims about its new Audigy chipset, naming it a substantial quad times faster than its predecessor. You either assume this is purely marketing, or believe what is advertised albeit taking with a pinch of salt. Before we discuss the results, allow us to dwell over the importance of how fast a sound card is. To illustrate a point we will use a game as an example as the logical outcome is also true within other applications. How well a game performs is first and for most determined by the CPU and 3D card within a system. This is later followed by RAM performance and FSB speed. Unless you happen to play games in mute mode there is also one remaining key element, namely the sound card.

Over the years sound cards have progressed in strengths both in power and how they connect in the system. From the days of ISA to PCI, through the days from the first DSP to the Audigy, sound processing has taking leaps and bounds. As time passed by software has increased in complexity and as in our game example, sound demands have inclined steadily too. So what can all this logical step by step analysis mean? Quite simply that how many FPS (frames per second) in a game your system renders is also at the mercy of your sound card. The faster the sound card, the less CPU time it will extract, thus permitting the processor(s) to spend more time processing other areas that form part of the game, first and foremost the 3D graphics engine. With that in mind below are the benchmark results using Audio Winbench 99. We compared Creative's previous generation EMU10K1 DSP with the new Audigy DSP in both Windows 2000 and XP.

Note: We used the drivers found on the Installation CD for both Windows 2000 and XP. For Windows XP we later installed the driver update before initiating the tests.

Crucial RAM was used for all performance testing purposes.

Note: Please note that a lower CPU usage value equals better performance.
The first thing we notice is the large difference in CPU usage between the Sound Blaster Audigy and Sound Blaster Live!. In some places this is over 400% while in others only around 200%. Another observation worth noting is how driver performance can vary in Windows 2000 Vs Windows XP. While in some tests Windows XP proves to the fastest, in others Windows 2000 steals back the crown. It is still early for this OS and card, and given time, we have a feeling things will improve in Windows XP's favor. As drivers mature, their quality strives forward too. With that said the current state of the drivers does not affect the evidence telling us that the Audigy is a lot more powerful than its Live! sibling, now regarded as its predecessor. The truth is simple, while the Audigy can be as much as 400% faster, it is not what our findings proved in all cases. Given that statement, there is still nothing to be against conveying that the Audigy is considerably faster in those areas where it cannot meet the claimed 400% improvement promise. We are quite satisfied in supporting Creative's 4x speed claims in that four of the eight graphs (all on the left hand side) above present this trend clearly. To be blunt, if you want the power to perform, then this is the card to get.

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