Gravis Ultrasound most probably

for pci i guess its the creative emu10k/20k series, according to some reviews.

PCI? Probably SBLive/Audigy on the VXD drivers.

ISA? It's hard to say. Few ISA cards have any brainpower beyond being a DAC. Ultrasound as said above has hardware mixing but it's rarely utilized. Wavetable boards with hardware MPU-401 probably use less CPU than a AWE32 running AWEUTIL.

Honestly, I don't think it matters. Up until the quake3/UT era soundcards were very "dumb" cards. For the most part, there were just fancy digital to analog converters. However, once 3D audio came around then it started to matter.

me neither.... but the emu10k are also known as SB live... they had PCI latency issues and really screw things up when you tried to play games as it's trying to hog the PCI bus.... forget CPU usage, those things just plain sucked under heavy use!

I've owned a Live! Value, two Audigys and two X-Fi's, used on six different motherboards (440BX, 815, 865PE, P43, P45 and one that I can't remember but it was Intel as well). From Windows 98SE, XP, Vista to 7.

I've seen many message board posts and articles talking about stuttering or crackling sound and the PCI latency/bus-hogging issue over the years but I've never experienced it myself.

it's a more common issue when using non-intel chipsets, I've seen it myself... it was such a huge turn off!

Yup some VIA-based motherboards have poorly written BIOSs that configure the PCI bus incorrectly and cripple its performance. It affects any PCI device, but sound cards make it obvious. I had a VIA Apollo Pro board once that was so bad that Live! didn't work at all until I installed the PCI Latency Patch.

Although you can also get sound card problems that are caused by 3D cards. Or they may worsen problems. 3D cards try to use a lot of bus time and PCI sound cards are sensitive to latency problems.

In that case, which VIA Apollo Pro133T motherboards DON'T have a crappy BIOS? (Yeah, I must be crazy for wanting to have a Tualatin-compatible board with an ISA slot or two, but I do want to make sure it has its way with UT 1999 and everything released before it. UnrealEngine1 wants all the CPU horsepower it can get.)

I'll probably be using a Turtle Beach Montego II as opposed to my Creative SB Live! Value for A3D's sake, so the extra CPU headroom will be needed as A3D 2.0/3.0 is quite the CPU hog with Aureal Vortex cards. (There's a Half-Life benchmark floating around showing just how much of a performance hit EAX and especially A3D can cause on the hardware of the day.) Too bad they didn't survive long enough for the SQ3500 Turbo's DSP daughterboard to enter mass production and for the drivers to actually utilize it, for that would have lessened or possibly eliminated the performance gap between Vortex2 and EMU10k1 (Live!).

Also, I can't say I've had any serious sound issues with my Auzentech X-Fi Prelude that weren't fixed in later driver revisions. Works great in both my Vista/Win7 Q6600/P35 modern gaming box and my WinXP XP 3200+/nForce2 classic gaming setup with current driver packages.

XFi cards have problems with OpenAL games sometimes. Probably because those are the few games that still use hardware acceleration. I recall static and pops while playing STALKER on a P965 motherboard with a XFi Elite Pro. Honestly I think hardware audio acceleration via PCI is simply problematic and it's better that we are moving towards utilizing multicore CPUs for audio.

Regarding good VIA boards - you should probably hit Google with a search for Live/Audigy and the board model number. However, remember you can always use the VIA PCI Latency patch with any older VIA motherboard. It's a small driver that reprograms chipset registers during boot, bypassing the BIOS settings.

I can't say I noticed any issues with the OpenAL games I have. No static, pops, or crashes. I can play with hardware acceleration all day in anything UnrealEngine2-based (UT 2004, Killing Floor, Red Orchestra, etc.), UT 1999 with Old Unreal OpenAL patch, S.T.A.L.K.E.R., Battlefield 2/2142, Amnesia: The Dark Descent (after a little .ini file editing since Frictional Games doesn't really support OpenAL devices other than the basic Generic Software one), and so on.

It's been a while since I used the PCI X-Fi Prelude in my main machine, though. That system now runs with the X-Fi Titanium HD, which is PCI-Express and claims to have rewritten drivers that work better with Vista/Win7 while not even bothering to support XP. I think it's more about the drivers, though, since they're a bit more stable than the Auzentech X-Fi Forte's drivers, and that's also a PCIe card.

While I'm not necessarily against CPU-processed audio, the whole XAudio2 + X3DAudio and FMOD Ex trend has resulted in a major regression for PC gaming audio in general, because now I have to settle for virtual 5.1/7.1 instead of a proper 3D binaural HRTF audio mix where I get smooth panning and a sense of high and low. Needless to say, I'm not happy about how modern games tend to sound much worse positionally than games from as far back as 1998.

Software audio done right would be more like Rapture3D, which just happens to be a software OpenAL audio device. Unfortunately, that means it ONLY works with OpenAL games, and the User/Advanced editions don't include any sort of DirectSound3D-to-OpenAL wrapper ala ALchemy. It's also said to have quite the performance penalty even on modern CPUs; apparently, mixing lots of channels with no quality loss isn't as easy as you'd think, even with today's CPUs. (I was actually thinking about GPU-mixed audio at one point. If modern GPGPU designs can handle raytracing in real-time, then how about bringing back that Aureal-style wavetracing and doing that on the GPU?)

So that VIA PCI Latency patch can override BIOS settings like that, huh? I guess that makes the search for my Win98SE build's motherboard a bit easier if that's the only thing keeping the mobo in question from being ideal for my purposes.

nameless for ut99 are you using the creative labs eax enhancement files?

To answer Shodan486's question, IMHO,

1. When it comes to a 386 and 486 system, it's best to avoid any PCI based sound cards. Most, if not all PCI cards depend on some sort of emulation to conform to Sound Blaster et al standards. Emulation takes up CPU power. Furthermore, avoid mixing DOS games in native/pure mode and PCI sound cards, if at all possible.

2. ISA-based sound cards are best for DOS games for a system which has ISA slots.

3. The original Sound Blaster 1.5, 2.0, Pro, Pro2 and non-PnP Sound Blaster 16 cards are good candidates. All these do not require any software loading except for the SET BLASTER (and maybe SET SOUND for some games) statement in the Autoexec.bat file. Some of the DOS games do not even require this statement to be present in the environment. These games access the sound cards directly at either IRQ7 or IRQ5, or selectable via the game's setup.

The PnP cards do not require additional CPU resources; PnP software just initializes the card, but I don't like the idea of software enabling a sound card in an old machine.

4. I don't think games designed during the 386/486-era suffer from a sound card utilizing system resources. Do they? These games depend on raw CPU power, rather than getting affected by sound cards getting their share from CPU workload.

On the other hand, yes, newer Windows-era games are affected where much frames-per-second numbers are vital in benchmarking, and there are too many event-dependent sound effects and music coming into play.

I do not have enough experiences when it comes to other cards like the GUS, but so far, Creative's SB 1.5, Pro and 16 are nice.

BTW., I'm using a CT2760 SBAWE32 with LAPC-I card in my 486 currently.

I prefer to play DOOM, DESCENT, HERETIC and other DOS FPS games in my Pentium 133 and P II 400 based machines.

Thanks Malik to come back to my questions 😀...Guys above got astray, anyways provided some more info about the Apollo chipset I used my dual PIII machine - I neither experienced problems or any inappropriate stuff while using sound cards, namely SB Live!, anyways then I switched to the USB SB16...

To your 3rd point - I installed my sound card via the '' Add hardware '' search (automatic) and it found & installed the driver as if a sort of modern devices are installed today. Is there a (performance) difference in doing it this way or it is preferred to use the autoexec / config file?

To your 4th point - well, isn't that bad anyways? Yes, the game indeed is most of the time dependent on the CPU, but as you said, when a sound card waits for getting noticed by the CPU, also the game needs to wait for the sound card to get noticed by the CPU - thus the game suffers too no? I can imagine that a sound card may discard the audio sample that has to be put out when it doesn't get its time with the CPU, but I think this ability concerns only modern audio solutions...

My point is that a LOT, almost all games really perform much faster with the sound card disabled in the Device Manager - I don't think the ISA bus got so hogged by one device, so I suppose its the sound card that really hogs the CPU.

I'll try to acquire GUS based sound cards since they ''may'' unburden the CPU.

I think it's better to select manually the sound card you have in the dos game's setup.

Most games won't have problems detecting it, but with newer ISA cards, some games that use the AWE cards specifically will get confused. Some will automatically select the original Sound Blaster, instead of Sound Blaster 16 or Pro, thus, missing the stereo sounds, for example. It's not an issue though, since you have the liberty of correcting it, provided the auto-detect sequence does not crash. (iirc, systems with SCSI components are more likely to crash during the auto-detect routine, as well as those systems that have more than 1 sound card).

(Of course, sometimes you feel "good" seeing a game setup selecting "Sound Blaster AWE32" for you. 😁)

I was of the opinion that the 486DX-based systems do not suffer as much as lesser systems when it comes the sound card hogging on the resources. Games that utilize more channels, especially for sound effects may cause more slowdowns. This can be somewhat be offset in games like DOOM where you can reduce the number of channels used. In other games like Terminal Velocity, you also have the option to reduce the audio frequency to 22khz or 11khz to speed up the game in slower systems.

This is one of the reasons I prefer to play DOOM-family games in my Pentium 133 based system. Even Wing Commander plays smoothly in it with internal cache disabled.

I'm sure that DOS games don't send more than 2 channels of audio to a sound card at once. The game engine is mixing those sounds into mono or stereo and then sending to the DAC. So it hits the CPU, but the sound card isn't a factor.

Another way a DOS game will affect CPU usage is the sound quality settings you choose. I'm sure the demands vary a lot between 11KHz/8-bit/mono and 44KHz/16-bit/stereo. You have more bus traffic, more data being moved through RAM, probably varying sound card efficiency, and the game engine doing the mixing.

Davros wrote:

nameless for ut99 are you using the creative labs eax enhancement files?

I usually install the EAX patches before the Old Unreal multimedia patch. Not sure if they're needed on the GOTY Edition release, though.

Back on topic: sound cards generally only affect framerates for games with hardware-accelerated audio, unless the drivers on some cards are bigger CPU hogs than others.

As for which ones are best, it's hard to say because there's so many sound cards out there, and I've only used a select few.