OC-Master
11-13-04, 04:13 PM
M-Audio Revolution 7.1 X1 Express
Creative Sound Blaster Zenith
-------------------------------------
If your planning on upgrading your motherboard, make sure you got at least one X1 PCI Express slot so that you can expand to higher end sound cards in the near feature.
Both M-Audio and Creative are launching PCI Express sound cards that have DSP's that are five times more powerful than that in the Revolution 7.1 and AudigyII ZS.
Although Creative Labs refuses to comment on unannouced products, its very likely that we'll see a large FPS boost in our favorite games when running HD 24-bit sound in 5.1 or 7.1 with an X1 Express card over the legacy PCI sound cards.
If you can remember back to the days of ISA, PCI sound cards gave massive boosts in performance to PCs for all multimedia. People say that PCI (133MB/s) is enough to fill the needs of the sound department of the PC but to what degree? Is it fast enough to transfer a 20MB sound file instantly without a hickup in audio quality?
So I decided to do some math in the bandwidth department.
Bits / Eight = Bites X Frequency = 1 Sound Channel X no. of channels = Total Bandwidth Needed Minimum
Streaming audio directly to your sound card takes up...
Standard CD's need roughly 176.4KB/s (16/8=2X44.1=88.2KB/s Mono X 2 = 176.4KB/s) (150~200KB/s)(1X CDROM) to play CD Quality music. Doesnt sound like much but lets add six more channels at CD Quality. So that 16/2=2X44.1=88.2KB/s Mono X 8 = 706KB/s to play CD Quality 7.1 sound.
OK, lets add 24-bit 44.1kHz 7.1 into the mix..
24/8=3X44.1=132.3KB/s Mono X 8 = 1059KB/s to play 24-bit 7.1 sound.
Now lets add in 96kHz to the mix to make the sound a little crisper. All the Audigy cards can do 96kHz playback for reference sake..
24/8=3X96=288KB/s Mono X 8 = 2.3MB/s to play 24-bit 96kHz 7.1 sound.
Finally, lets do what no one has done before, lets use 24-bit 192kHz 7.1 . To date, no cards can do this reason being because it simply takes too much processing power for the DSP to handle.
24/8=3X192=576KB/s Mono X 8 = 4.6MB/s
4.6MB/s for the ultimate (BASIC) sound quality. So why doesnt this standard exist yet? Probally because most people probally cannot hear the difference and or Sound Card manufacturers have not gotten DSP's fast enough to process sound at this quality level.
EAX, Dolby and DTS all play big roles in amount of bandwidth consumed. Dolby uses about five times the memory to run its format. Being that, per channel you'd be looking at about 23MB/s for 7.1 24-bit 192kHz Dolby sound. DTS uses even more bandwidth, about twice that of Dolby according to Mpeg-2 specifications.
Thanks to compression, a 46MB/s DTS stream becomes 20x less in Mpeg2 making it only 2.3MB/s for 192kHz or 1.15MB/s for 96kHz.
EAX on the other hand uses little or no bandwidth because all sound is processed in the DSP of the sound card in realtime. With PCI Express, instead of having to uncompress the DTS/Dolby sound with the processor, the signal can by pass the CPU and go directly to the sound card. Rumors have it that PCI Express sound cards will come with onboard cache memory whether cached into the DSP or onboard. This would allow for a complete dump of an operation in one task and give oodles of space directly from the ram allowing the whole stream to play flawlessly.
PCI-Express allows your sound card to access your RAM without even having to pass through your CPU unlike PCI sound cards. This is where you see your FPS gain in almost any task relating to sound be it gaming or for studio use.
To make all this jiberish simple, think of PCI Express sound cards as an AGP port. You can cache with your ram on your machine for any sound related materials.
But untill these cards exist, we are all fine with today's PCI cards. BTW, Express cards should be cheaper because the boards are alot smaller which in turn means less circurtry.
I'd like to thank my dad for lending me his Sony Dolby Digital sound guide and for his advice in the studio department. I my self am a PC DJ and I love mixin on the PC.
OC-Master
Creative Sound Blaster Zenith
-------------------------------------
If your planning on upgrading your motherboard, make sure you got at least one X1 PCI Express slot so that you can expand to higher end sound cards in the near feature.
Both M-Audio and Creative are launching PCI Express sound cards that have DSP's that are five times more powerful than that in the Revolution 7.1 and AudigyII ZS.
Although Creative Labs refuses to comment on unannouced products, its very likely that we'll see a large FPS boost in our favorite games when running HD 24-bit sound in 5.1 or 7.1 with an X1 Express card over the legacy PCI sound cards.
If you can remember back to the days of ISA, PCI sound cards gave massive boosts in performance to PCs for all multimedia. People say that PCI (133MB/s) is enough to fill the needs of the sound department of the PC but to what degree? Is it fast enough to transfer a 20MB sound file instantly without a hickup in audio quality?
So I decided to do some math in the bandwidth department.
Bits / Eight = Bites X Frequency = 1 Sound Channel X no. of channels = Total Bandwidth Needed Minimum
Streaming audio directly to your sound card takes up...
Standard CD's need roughly 176.4KB/s (16/8=2X44.1=88.2KB/s Mono X 2 = 176.4KB/s) (150~200KB/s)(1X CDROM) to play CD Quality music. Doesnt sound like much but lets add six more channels at CD Quality. So that 16/2=2X44.1=88.2KB/s Mono X 8 = 706KB/s to play CD Quality 7.1 sound.
OK, lets add 24-bit 44.1kHz 7.1 into the mix..
24/8=3X44.1=132.3KB/s Mono X 8 = 1059KB/s to play 24-bit 7.1 sound.
Now lets add in 96kHz to the mix to make the sound a little crisper. All the Audigy cards can do 96kHz playback for reference sake..
24/8=3X96=288KB/s Mono X 8 = 2.3MB/s to play 24-bit 96kHz 7.1 sound.
Finally, lets do what no one has done before, lets use 24-bit 192kHz 7.1 . To date, no cards can do this reason being because it simply takes too much processing power for the DSP to handle.
24/8=3X192=576KB/s Mono X 8 = 4.6MB/s
4.6MB/s for the ultimate (BASIC) sound quality. So why doesnt this standard exist yet? Probally because most people probally cannot hear the difference and or Sound Card manufacturers have not gotten DSP's fast enough to process sound at this quality level.
EAX, Dolby and DTS all play big roles in amount of bandwidth consumed. Dolby uses about five times the memory to run its format. Being that, per channel you'd be looking at about 23MB/s for 7.1 24-bit 192kHz Dolby sound. DTS uses even more bandwidth, about twice that of Dolby according to Mpeg-2 specifications.
Thanks to compression, a 46MB/s DTS stream becomes 20x less in Mpeg2 making it only 2.3MB/s for 192kHz or 1.15MB/s for 96kHz.
EAX on the other hand uses little or no bandwidth because all sound is processed in the DSP of the sound card in realtime. With PCI Express, instead of having to uncompress the DTS/Dolby sound with the processor, the signal can by pass the CPU and go directly to the sound card. Rumors have it that PCI Express sound cards will come with onboard cache memory whether cached into the DSP or onboard. This would allow for a complete dump of an operation in one task and give oodles of space directly from the ram allowing the whole stream to play flawlessly.
PCI-Express allows your sound card to access your RAM without even having to pass through your CPU unlike PCI sound cards. This is where you see your FPS gain in almost any task relating to sound be it gaming or for studio use.
To make all this jiberish simple, think of PCI Express sound cards as an AGP port. You can cache with your ram on your machine for any sound related materials.
But untill these cards exist, we are all fine with today's PCI cards. BTW, Express cards should be cheaper because the boards are alot smaller which in turn means less circurtry.
I'd like to thank my dad for lending me his Sony Dolby Digital sound guide and for his advice in the studio department. I my self am a PC DJ and I love mixin on the PC.
OC-Master