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BlueGears X-Mystique 7.1 Review

Good, but not Creative (thankfully)

by Josh Walrath

Games

            This is an area with mixed feelings.  When using a pure software environment, the X-Mystique always did very well.  Game audio is not terribly accurate as is, and most of the audio in games still relies on 16 bit/22 KHz sounds.  It really isn’t until recently that many developers are starting to use 24 bit/48 KHz sound files.  As such, the accuracy of the card really is beyond question.  It reproduces the sound in games without a hitch, with no crackling/popping/hissing.

The PCB is packed with components, and it is a very nice sounding card with the upgradeable OPAMPS (large, black squares with 8 silver leads).  If upgrading the OPAMPS, make sure to note which way they are situated (the inputs are reversed from the outputs).

            Once EAX and DirectSound 3D are used, then things can get tricky.  Depending on the coding of the game, the sound can be either really good or really bad.  In Battlefield 2 enabling hardware support with this card resulted in a lot of distortion as well as other audio artifacts.  Games such as F.E.A.R. proved to handle the hardware acceleration of this card a lot better, and the user was rewarded for enabling hardware support by a more immersive environment.  As it is the X-Mystique only supports up to EAX 2.0, and due to licensing issues it cannot support anything higher than that (EAX 3.0, 4.0, and the latest 5.0).  It does support A3D 1.0, but few applications support that standard anymore.

            In applications that work well with this card, it sounds great.  Explosions have a lot of punch, dialogue is clear, and the overall environmental effects are impressive and add a lot to the game.  Other applications, such as Quake 4, do not support the X-Mystique in hardware at all, and a lot of the ambiance is sacrificed when using a non-Creative card.  In Quake 4, the difference in sound quality and immersiveness was night and day between the X-Mystique and the Audigy 2 ZS.  The Audigy 2 just sounded a whole lot better, but in the X-Mystique’s defense that card did not crash the game as much as the Audigy 2 did.  When playing Quake 4 with EAX HD (4.0) on the Creative Audigy 2 ZS I frequently had BSOD’s during gameplay that did not exist when using the software enabled X-Mystique.

            Good programming goes a long ways when it comes to sound performance.  In well crafted games the X-Mystique stood toe to toe with Creative’s Audigy 2, but once higher levels of EAX were used then the Audigy walked away.  Still, the X-Mystique did very well and the latest set of drivers has certainly helped in application compatibility and stability.  I have never had a game crash due to using the X-Mystique, but I have often had other applications crash when using the Audigy 2 ZS. 

Performance

            F.E.A.R. has one of the most advanced audio engines to date, and this is required to achieve the creepy and immersive environments that this title sports.  As such it supports several types of sound rendering.  Two-channel software audio is the most basic, but it still uses HRTF functionality to achieve greater immersion.  Next up is the 5.1 software rendering, and then different levels of hardware mixing and EAX.  Graphic quality was set to low levels, as well as world complexity for this test.

            An Athlon X2 3800+ clocked at 2.4 GHz was used with 2 GB of PC3200 DDR SDRAM as well as a Radeon X1800 XT.  800x600 resolution was used. 

            We can see the performance hit that comes with converting everything to 5.1 sound on this card.  Remember, the DSP functionality of the C-Media chip is nothing amazing, but it does a good job.  An X-Fi it is not!  Now we will see how much of a hit this card takes with hardware mixing, EAX, and DDL thrown into the mix. 

            With this test we can see that enabling hardware mixing and EAX does have a performance hit over software audio rendering.  What is surprising though is that adding EAX and Dolby Digital Live does not cause a performance hit with this card.  This essentially means that the CPU is not taking up the slack, and pretty much all audio processing is going on in the card.  The drop in performance between software 5.1 and hardware mixing is a bit odd though, as it should be the other way around.  I guess this just shows the limitations to the DSP portion of the C-Media chip.  Converting the audio to a DD 5.1 stream takes no resources from the CPU, which is a very positive aspect of this card.  Other DDL solutions make extensive use of CPU cycles to achieve their results, so it is good to see the X-Mystique not taking up those CPU cycles to do DDL.

Next: Conclusion

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