Game Performance – Voices
Serious Sam 2 is a great test for audio processing as the game has an adjustment for the number of simultaneous voices from 5 to 30. We run our audio hardware through the Serious Sam 2 “Generator” benchmark at 10, 20, and 30 voices for 5 loops.
“Good” – A sound card is considered “good” if its effect on the frame rate is minimal. This measured by the distribution of frame rates above and below 30 FPS. The more frames distributed above 30 FPS, the better as 30 FPS is considered by many the minimum tolerable (or playable) frame rate.
“Poor” – Conversely, if more frames are distributed below 30 FPS the performance is considered poor.
The results are as follows:
| Frame Rate Range |
Xtreme |
SB X-Fi |
Chaintech |
Audigy |
Realtek |
| 1 – 30 FPS |
21.3% |
16.5% |
26.0% |
20.2% |
19.0% |
| 30+ FPS |
78.7% |
83.5% |
74.0% |
79.8% |
81.0% |
At 10 voices, the Xtreme Sound 7.1 performs similarly to the other cards with roughly 80% of the frame rates above 30 FPS.
| Frame Rate Range |
Xtreme |
SB X-Fi |
Chaintech |
Audigy |
Realtek |
| 1 – 30 FPS | 20.2% | 18.1% | 42.1% | 20.3% | 21.5% |
| 30+ FPS | 79.8% | 81.9% | 57.9% | 79.7% | 78.5% |
At 20 voices, the Xtreme Sound keeps close to the Creative Labs card with similar distributions. It’s important to see that with an increase from 10 to 20 voices, the performance remains constant. Perhaps going to 30 voices will reveal something interesting…
| Frame Rate Range |
Xtreme |
SB X-Fi |
Chaintech |
Audigy |
Realtek |
| 1 – 30 FPS |
30.4% |
18.7% |
51.8% |
21.3% |
26.3% |
| 30+ FPS |
69.6% |
81.3% |
48.2% |
78.7% |
73.7% |
At 30 voices, we see a better differentiation amoung the candidates. The distribution on the Xtreme Sound 7.1 changes from 20% in the 1-30 FPS range to 30%. This by no means is poor as majority of the frame rates are in the playable 30 – 50 FPS interval.
The Chaintech V710 in shows poor results and struggles in this test. In contrast, the Creative Labs cards maintain consistent distributions across all these tests.
Update on Chaintech V710
It’s important to note that the Chaintech V710 does not support EAX extensions. So any game optimized for EAX will appear to perform poorly on non-EAX hardware like the V710.
