Classic British Flight Sim

My old soundcard has come to the end of its' life, was a Creative Lab Soundblaster Live 5.1 had it ever since I purchased a Dell Computer 6 -7 years ago and just carried it over on upgrades but for some time it had, when flying FS and changing spot view, given some noisy crackles. The original driver did not appear to work properly so ran it from Windows Drivers (XP).

Have just bought a Creative SoundBlaster Audigy SE 24bit Card at £30 and although this may be a drop in audio quality I have yet to notice it. When I loaded FS9 I found that frame rates were much better i.e. 4 - 8 frames more, I know this does not sound a lot but in busy areas it helps tremendously and a/c engines noise appears noticeably better.

Are the increase in frame rates my imagination or is it down to having a new sound card?

Regards
Nigel.

That is interesting Nigel...Never occured to me that a Sound card could affect frame rates...I've used that Audigy2ZS for the last few years and have always been very pleased with it :flying:

Nigel, Peter -

I don't have a sound card in the current Flying Machine, but I really should, since anything that takes some work off the CPU should improve FS9 performance.
A couple of years back, I suddenly found the runway at EGGD was disintegrating under me as I took off :o . I soon realised the effect was proportional to throttle opening, and that reminded me that the install routine for the Amelia Earhart Lockheed had recommended setting the FS sound quality to High, which I had done. Set it back to what it had been, and the problem went away . It's just a pity the grey hairs it produced can't be fixed as easily as the runway was.....

MikeW

Yup.. it's been widely publisised over more years than I can remember that a poor soundcard will hit framerates in flightsim though with the advent of onboard sound.. the problem just about disappeared. Changing the sound setting from High to Medium will usually clear most sound related problems (especially with Creative cards) and I can't tell the difference

ATB

DaveB :tab:

If I set my frames rates to 40, then both the sound (at full throttle) and screen stutter. OK at 25 per sec though.

Time for a new sound card then. Joy.

Just did a couple of take-offs from Heathrow 9R where frames decreased quite a bit before and have found much improvement over the old sound card. Tried what you said Dave and set the sound from full acceleration to basic, got a few more frames into the bargain, now I'm really chuffed!!

As you also said, I have not noticed any difference in sound quality when trying out a number of a/c from internal to external views. They all sounded the same on basic and full acceleration.

Regards
Nigel.

Hi Nigel

That's great.. any gain is a good gain ;-) I doubt if any of us have a good enough ear to appreciate the subtle nuances 'High' offers over 'Med' or 'Basic'.. I most certainly don't. Perhaps if you listen to a great deal of Classical Music and have a speaker system to match.. there may be a difference but for gaming, there really isn't any need to have the setting on 'High'

ATB

DaveB :tab:

Thanks Dave, just goes to show that improvements can be gained not only through more RAM and Graphic Cards but also Sound Cards which is something I didn't know about before!!

Would have dun this ages ago had I known!! :brick:

Regards
Nigel.

Nice work, Nigel !
At the end of the day all (haha, "all", he says) that FS does is figure out what the next screen should look like, and what noises should be made at that time, and send those instructions to appropriate hardware for final delivery. That is a massive calculation involving lots of interacting parameters, and FS does it hundreds of times while you and I are just beginning to realise how many inputs are involved. That is why it is so processor-intensive. RAM is where it works out and keeps the sub-totals it is going to use in the final calculation, so the more RAM the better, and the more part-finished work it can farm out to the graphics card or a sound card for completion the less the CPU has to do, so frame rates go up.
To follow on from Dave's word of caution, there is no point having the latest you-beaut super-duper card if you need a computer to measure the improvement. I enjoy classical music, but I can't tell if the third violin played a note at 13970 c/s instead of 14000, and I don't pretend to. Some lucky musical people do have that ability, but I am not one of them. :-(
Cheers
MikeW

I certainly noticed the difference in sound quality between the onboard sound, my old Hercules Digifire and my latest HDA X-Mystique. Each time it sounded like I had new speakers.
I might upgrade soon to one that can output DTS 96/24 over the optical to my Logitech Z5500's instead of just Dolby digital.