Time to dig out the dredge, lol
I stopped using my X-fi Titanium and switched back to my integrated realtek sound from my motherboard and I'm liking it all the same.
On the plus side my Graphics Card is using all 16x PCIe lanes. It couldn't before when my Xfi in its PCIe slot would force my card into x8.
Depends on how your motherboard splits the PCIE lanes . . . if some lanes are already being used for onboard features, simply tossing in a PCIEx1 card will force x16 down to x8 as there aren't other lanes available. This was a big issue with a lot of older NSBs a few years back, before the advent of PCIE2.0. Sometimes disabling some onboard stuff via BIOS will help, but not always - depends on the board and BIOS.
Asus will not drop cpu usage. And quit using XP x64. It's poorly supported, even by Asus. Most XP x64 drivers are inferior to Vista and Win7 or even 32bit XP.
Agreed. If anything, ASUS' DSPs
add to CPU usage. It's not too much of a problem with the higher bandwidth provided by more modern PCIE setups - but if you're still using a PCI card, expect some issues to crop up somewhere (especially if you're using nVidia graphics). ASUS' PCIE cards add a ton of latency to the audio stream, too, as they make use of a translator chip . . . it leaves the SYS having to spend more time catering to the demands of the audio hardware, and latency in the audio stream is a bad thing . . .
Figured out the issue with the titanium driver, so no more problems. Yes, XP64 takes a bit more brainpower to tweak and get running perfectly, but the 20-30% fps increase I get in games over win7 is worth it. The os is mature, and rock solid, and miles better than the old and now unsupported xp32. Shut down unneeded stuff so I could get 0% cpu usage on both cores, ran an mp3 on winamp, cores stayed at 0%. That's real audio acceleration, which doesn't exist in vista or win7. Ran a video in winamp, stayed mostly at 0%, with occasional jumps to 2%. That's just extra fps for me!
It's possible to obtain 0% CPU usage of the audio system on Vista/OS7 - with a native PCIE card. Only Creative and Auzen offer these ATM. The biggest caveat of Vista/OS7, though, is lack of DirectSound support, which means software cannot directly make use of your hardware (no hardware acceleration). Instead, everything is passed through a translation layer between the software and your drivers via the OS kernel. Using OpenAL API can get around some of the headaches involved with this process, but it still adds some latency to the whole deal . . . and WIN doesn't always handle hardware tasking properly. unlike with XP, your audio driver software and the OS don't always work in symbiosis, and changes made via the audio software won't always affect the hardware settings in WIN's control panels - conversely, if WIN gets too "confused" it has a bad knack for chaning your audio hardware settings without making the changes to your driver software, which can lead to conflicting problems that crop up with certain types of playback (DVD, gaming, etc.). The only hardware that doesn't have this problem is onboard, and simply because of how WIN can allow for interfacing compared to discrete cards.
IMHO, there have been more audio related issues since Vista and OS7 than there ever were with XP. Problem being is that XP is very near EOL, and MS is slowly dropping all support of the OS . . . which means we all will simply have to learn to cope with the problems of Vista and OS7, or find work-arounds for it's quirks . . . or go back to on-board audio solutions (which many of us are simply not willing to do). Hopefully in the future, MS might see the err of their ways and re-instate DS . . . but, doubtful.
. . . and for anyone not aware of how piss-poor on-board audio quality is compared to a dedicated card:
http://forums.techpowerup.com/showthread.php?t=64921
