UT2003 Sound

[Looney1a]

My firend recently downloaded the UT2003 patch. When he did this all his options were reset to defaults, which on his system is pretty much all the graphics options to the max and software sound. Prior to this he had his sound on hardware + EAX and all the graphics option on low to medium and it ran at a good speed. When the patch was installed he started the game it looked alot better (being on high graphics and all) but sounded no different. When he put the sound option back to hardware + EAX it was playing really slow. So basicly in a nutshall having it on hardware sound slow down his system a hell of alot and yet makes sounds no difference.

Now this is the bit i don't understand, i thought software sound was made in the cpu, and hardware sound made in the sound card, so hardware sound should be faster. Strange. When he told me this I changed my sound option to software and my frame rates sky rocketed. Does anyone have any idea whats goin on? Our system specs are listed below.

My system
2.4GhzB Pentium 4
Gigabyte P4 Titian GA-8IGX (i845g)
512mb DDR ram (333mhz)
ATi Radeon 9700pro
Sound blaster Live! 5.1
Window XP HE
Other stuff which doesn't really matter

Friend's system
Athlon XP 1700+
Gigabyte something or other (based on the KT333)
512mb DDR ram (333mhz)
Leadtek GeForce 3 Ti500
Sound blaster Live! 5.1
Windows XP HE
Other suff which doesn't really matter.

Looney

 

[Brian48]

This is perfectly normal. HW audio does not necessarily mean that the sound card is relieving the burden from the CPU completely. It means that you've opted to used the audio 3d positioning and other special effects only available through the sound card, however, your CPU still has to calculate this extra information to send to the sound card. Look at it this way. It's a lot worse with the other non-Creative sound cards so count yourself lucky. It's about costs me a whopping 30% dip in performance whenever I enabled HW audio with my old Acoustic Edge. EAX with UT2003 doesn't even work with my old Acoustic Edge or Santa Cruz, just 3d HW (although the game will still allow me to select it in the audio menu).