Sound card does matter. Even in KF

[nutterbutter]

I had a Soundblaster X-Fi in Windows 7 for years. No problems and it sounded great. I upgraded to Win8 and there were a ton of problems. Nothing major, but I had to reset the settings after each boot for the soundcard to work. The driver situation got even worse after the 8.1 upgrade. Finally, I got tired of screwing around with it so I uninstalled it and went with the onboard audio. I'm using a soundbar/subwoofer as 2.1 so I figured "what's the difference?"

Yesterday I saw the soundblaster z and on a lark, I ordered it next day prime. I just installed it and "Wow!" I can tell a big difference on KF. The game sounds much better and I am very surprised with the audio difference.

 

[zYnthetic]

Good to hear. Since Vista this depends on what the game is using. With the new audio stack everything is being mixed in software. OpenAL and ASIO are the only things the OS lets hardware mix now and since KF uses it (openal), you'll probably get a better experience. Not to say it sucks for games that don't, wasapi (the new audio stack) is way more efficient than the older directaudio so players that don't have the hardware can enjoy a similar experience on games with drivers that utilize it.

Since MS rewrote how the audio is mixed at the OS level I thought hardware was on its way out but now we've got SteamBox on the up, which I can see driving interest back up in linux friendly audio. As much as I liked the prospect of not needing hardware to get the same experience, it could end up being more relevant as Steam pushes advantages on developers for multi-OS builds.