VOGONS


First post, by valnar

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I've been reading for years that we should ditch our ISA sound cards in favor of PCI on P2 or P3 type computers. Some of the reasons is throughput of the ISA bus, number of simultaneous voices, sound quality and general speed hit. It's that last one I want to know more about. Because lets face it, if you are running Windows 9x and still play DOS games, compatibility is king and SB16 has it.

Does anyone have any benchmarks of how much the CPU is hit, or how slow games get the more you go up the CPU ladder? Is there a chart that shows a Pentium 200MMX only has a (for example) a 3% hit while a PII-300Mhz has a 10% hit? This would at least give me a target (or bang for the buck) of the fastest computer I could build to host a SB16 without it being a huge detriment to Windows 95 or the computer speed in general.

Reply 2 of 5, by m1so

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I think the compatibility problems arising from a new PCI card would not be worth the small speed increase. I know GUS kills performance in Quake, but that's probably because it's GUS as SB does not show such hits.

Reply 4 of 5, by valnar

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Hmm. Should go older (SB16) and newer too. Maybe the spread is more.

Reply 5 of 5, by d1stortion

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I don't have a SB16, but feel free to do any testing on your own 😀