X-bit labs

Creative SB Audigy 2 ZS Notebook: Serious Audio for Portable Systems (page 8)

Category: Multimedia

by Vasily Melnik

[ 08/31/2005 | 03:20 PM ]

Performance in Real Applications

I launched Unreal Tournament 2004 to see how hardware 3D sound positioning as performed by the Audigy 2 ZS Notebook card affect the performance of the system. The two operational modes of the card are compared with the results of an integrated AC’97 codec from Realtek and of a PCI Audigy 2 ZS card (this card was tested on another computer, so the numbers should not be compared directly).

The results of the audio subsystem tests from 3DMark03 are quite interesting, too:

As you can see, you have an excellent performance at hardware effect processing in the Advanced Feature mode and a rather average performance at software processing in the Standard mode. Don’t also forget that the Standard mode does not support EAX 4.0 Advanced HD, but only the previous version (3.0) also known as EAX Advanced HD. Thus, the Standard Feature mode is virtually useless for gaming purposes, just like it is for high-quality reproduction.