Call of Duty, EAX & Audigy

[gtx_slotcar]

I'm wondering if anyone here playing CoD is using an Audigy sound card. If so, and you can get an accurate timedemo frame rate (change com_maxfps "85" to "0"), can you tell me the frame rate loss you get when enabling EAX?
I'm not looking to know that you can play the game just fine, but an actual comparison of frame rates :)

Thanks

[mlcarr]

I can't answer you right now, but I have a new computer on order with an Audigy 2 ZS card and Creative T7700 7.1 speakers and CoD on the way. Once I get it going I will try and get frame rates to you.

[gtx_slotcar]

My Audigy 2 came in yesterday and I played around with it a bit last night. When you get yours, I'm still interested in your findings.

Here's the long story of what brought me to ask the question (for anyone with nothing better to do than read my post).

In Call of Duty, I noticed that when running low res. game and graphics card settings (at 1600 x 1200) I would get 150 fps in the timedemo I downloaded and use for benchmarks. This was with my Abit AI7's built in RealTek sound card. When I switched to my old SBLive, it jumped up to 180 fps. When I used EAX, it dropped to 108 fps. A 67% frame rate increase by turning off EAX is significant.

I recently bought a Sapphire Radeon 9800 Pro at newegg, so I've been on the ATI newsgroup for a while. I'd also read in CoD reviews and other forums that EAX really drops the frame rates. When someone on the ATI newsgroup posted choppy play with a 9800 Pro and mentioned he had an Audigy 2 and it only happened when he used EAX, I told him my findings and what I've read about EAX's burden in CoD. (he was worried that his 9800 or Audigy were defective.) A handful of replies came in saying that I was wrong and they had either 'no problem running the game in EAX with an Audigy' or 'had no loss in frame rates'. Of course, when I asked if they had actually done a timedemo comparison with and without EAX, I got no replies. So, I decided to do some more testing on my own.

I want my average fps to be around 100 so I don't get any real bog-downs in heavy action. I turned up some of the game's graphics options and set the card to 4xFSAA, 8xFA, and Quality Smoothvision, textures, mipmaps and truform; still at 1600x1200.
With EAX, my frame rate was 92 and without it was 17% more, 108 fps. The drop was a lot less at high graphics settings. At 92 fps, CoD is certainly playable, but the extra 16 fps without EAX would mean I could turn up a couple more graphics settings and still be above my goal of 100 fps. So, I decided to try an Audigy and see if it's a little more efficient than the SBLive.

Tests with the Audigy 2 show that it's good for a couple more fps, but that's it. Still, it's a good sounding card and I don't regret the purchase. If you already have an SBLive, don't buy an Audigy thinking it will increase performance, though.

Specs:
-Windows 2000 pro
-Viewsonic 21
-Fortron 350 PSU
-Abit AI7
-P4 1.8a OC'd to 2.52 and Zalman 7000 HSF, Arctic Silver 5
-Geil PC3500 Platinum, 2 sticks of 256mb in dual channel mode at 2-6-2-2
-fsb: 140, mem: 187mHz (3:4 ratio)
-Sapphire Radeon 9800 Pro with ramsinks and Arctic Cooler VGA Silencer, OC'd to 432/398
-cpu 1.65v, mem 2.8v, agp 1.55v
-Hitachi SETA 80GB hard drive

3DM2001SE: 16850
3DM03: video 6452, cpu 544

Not the fastest scores, but good for a P4 1.8 and fast enough for Call of Duty, NR2003 and GPL :)

Gary

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