Re: Looking for cheap, good, well supported PCI-X soundcard

Andreas Grois wrote:

Since I bought a "new" mainboard with nforce 4-chipset, I'm
unable to play any games under wine (well, I'm one of Blizzards
WoW-victims) with sound enabled. I don't know if it's a problem
of the onboard soundchip or the linux-driver for it
(CONFIG_SND_INTEL8X0), but everytime a sound is played back,
the framerate drops from 50 to about 5 (so I have to disable
sound when playing). I didn't have that problem with my old VIA
K8T890-chipset.

In my experience the sound interface of WINE is a bit unsteady.
IMHO the best would be, to put some intermediate layer inbetween
that segregates WINE from the sound API. I'm thinking of ESD
here.

Your problem is probably, that mose games nowadays use the sound
output for timing, since the CPU instruction counter has become
an unrelaiable timing souce with the advent of dynamic clocking
(Intel SpeedStep, AMD PowerNow). Both Windows and Linux provide
a form of high precision counters, but those on Windows have
their own issues (unlike the quite reliable HRPT and RTC timers
of Linux). The sound output however is a very good timing source
in all cases. Given a certain sample rate and buffer length you
can precicely time a game by the asynchronous sound buffer
events (buffer starts playing, buffer playing has finished). Now
depending on the way, how a certain driver deals with reporting
finished buffers, it can happen that your program gets notified
about it with some delay => you game FPS drops.

Using ESD as an intermediary could be a solution.

Long introduction, short question:
Do you know any cheap PCI-express soundcard (since the only
free PCI-slot of my mainboard is the one directly below the
graphics-card -> installing anything there would block the
GPU-fan), that has a good old stereo output,

First: The correct abbreviation for PCI-Express is PCI-E. There's
also a standard PCI-X, which is however completely different
from what you mean.

Second: I hardly believe you, that the only free PCI slot is
directly below the graphics card. The graphics slot likely is a
PCI-E 16x, and the odds are good that the mainboard has more
than one PCI-E slot. However all PCI-E slots are grouped
together and most certainly not interrupted by a single PCI
slot. Probably you're mistaking a PCI-E 4x slot for a PCI slot
(they look similair, but are completely different).

Wolfgang Draxinger
--
E-Mail address works, Jabber: hexarith@xxxxxxxxxx, ICQ: 134682867

.

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