Game Tests
Game testing now. The Hollywood@Home 7.1 features Sensaura technology for supporting the latest audio formats and APIs used in current PC gaming. EAX2.0, EAX1.0, I3DL2 and A3D 1.x all get the nod, the Hollywood, via the Envy24HT-S, supports pretty much everything. The AD1980 gets the same Sensaura treatment, the technology for which was recently purchased by Creative. Here's hoping they continue to license the tech, it's especially important in the low end market that the Hollywood serves, that audio solutions get as much hardware assist for 3D audio APIs as possible, removing the processing strain on the host CPU. While neither AD1980 or Envy24HT-S do full hardware implementations of the audio APIs that they support, via Sensaura, at least part of the processing for the API in use, might be done on the chip.With low end machines having lesser powered CPUs by definition, it's more of an issue that Sensaura technology continues to be licensed by Creative, for limited hardware assist. It's CPU load that forms the basis of our game tests.
Since the K8V Deluxe is being used for hosting the Analog Devices AD1980 audio that's being used for comparison against the Hollywood, a Socket 754 Athlon 64 board means that Model 3200+ is the host processor. The system is also host to 512MB of Corsair XMS3200 v1.1 DIMMs, 2 x 256MB, at 2-2-2-6 settings. Two benchmarks that have a noticable different in results, when used with audio enabled or disabled, were chosen to highlight the audio performance in games. Quake 3 and the X2: The Threat demo both show nice frames per second differences when used with audio on or off.
To test, framerates were recorded with the audio enabled on each audio solution, then with the Hollywood removed and the onboard AD1980 disabled in the BIOS, to benchmark with no audio processing performed. That will give us a performance baseline and something to judge them against.
Quake 3 was run at 1024x768 using its High Quality setting, X2 was run at 1024x768 in its benchmark mode. AOpen's Aeolus 5950 Ultra provides the graphics horsepower, here are the graphs.
Indeed, I did more testing and I'd show you more graphs, but things look extremely similar to what you'll see above. We lose approximately 25-30% performance when audio is enabled, in both game tests, on both soundcard platforms. Other than that, there's little to separate the pairing in terms of CPU hit and performance loss. With Sensaura technology in both, it seems that both solutions employ a similar amount of CPU assist to process audio. Quake 3 and X2 on Windows both use DirectX for audio playback (Q3 using DX7 APIs).
The Hollywood@Home 7.1, using Envy24HT, was able to shade the win in both tests, but not by more than a percentage point or two.
Good performance from both, echoing what we saw previously in the listening tests. The 7.1 might be cheap but it's certainly not cheerful, it holds its own.
