TBH, unless one is a professional audio developer, today's high-end sound cards don't really offer all that much more than onboard sound. I pulled out my Creative Audigy 2 about a year ago in favor of my onboard Realtek sound hardware and have never noticed any difference in audio quality.

I'm certainly not a Professional sound developer, but I notice a difference from on board sound to my X-Fi (with the X-Fi sounding better). Maybe I'm just hypersensitive to the sounds at this point, but I don't think so.

I've got a squad mate that actually has on board X-Fi with HD sound which would be fine with me. My only desire is to have as complex and rich sounds as possible.

Honestly, CL Audigy 2 isn't much of a card anyway. :) I do agree, nowadays MBO sound cards are much better than few years back and if you're going to invest into a sound card you need to spend more money than before. That is of course, if you have the equipment to hear the difference, and I am not talking about any PC speakers - they are all toys.


Then there are Win Vista and Win 7 - no hardware support or acceleration other than OpenAL. Which renders EAX 5.0 and similar cards useless (for gaming). This is a bigger problem than the quality of the sound card itself.

Does it mean that SOW will not benefit from powerfull soundcards such as Creative X-Fi and all sound processing will be done in software?
I mean does it worth to buy good sound card, will performance be better?

I always got to LOL a bit, when reading such comments.

It's the same as playing a modern game with onboard graphics and claiming there is no difference between an onboard gfx-chip and a PCIe DX11 card.

And you know what? I would believe you! Modern onboard graphics play modern games, just at lowest detail settings and crappy FPS. But of course, if you play the game on a 15" TFT with 50ms and 640x480 pixels monochrome, you won't notice a difference, if you have a DX11 PCIe card or an onboard chip.

And you know what's the only difference between both examples?
1. Soundsettings are adapted automatically. If you don't have the hardware, you can't use these features. You'll never know the difference.

2. If you'd record an IL2-track in your high-end machine and sent it to me with above machine, your track would look the same crap as always, while it's great for you. I'd never know the difference and think my above rig is top-notch.
The same way, if I send you a soundrecord from my PC with a 200$ soundcard + 120$ hifi-headphones, you'll never know the difference, because the sound is rendered on your chip and displayed on your 10$ skype-headset.

3. It's not only about the rendering, it's about the periphery. If you have a 3$ headset, a 200$ soundcard won't help you and vice versa.

The sound is one of the few areas where gaming can very closely match real life, so i hope some care is taken. It was one of the few aspects of Il2 that was a letdown. In the cockpit the engine would have drowned out everything except the radio.

Also, it would be nice to get some contemporary lingo for the pilot chatter as well, to help with the pilot characterisation.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rKYL0tW-Ek

Your comments hit the bull's-eye there FF. I think this is one of the game-developers' biggest challenges - making sure that the game will look and sound good enough to satisfy those who own low and mid-range (modern) PCs, rather than just the overclocked, bleeding-edge, top-of-the-range-gaming-rigs' owners.

If the IL-2 series is a good comparison, then that challenge will be met for SoW-BoB. Of course it will look and sound better on a high-end machine (provided the headphones match the soundcard of course) and that is why we pay that premium. But we should spare a thought for the people who can't afford to reach those heights. If the game captivates them they will help to support the new product which can only be a good thing for all of us. We all know how it goes - once you're under the spell then you start upgrading to see what you're missing! ;)

Sorry to go off topic - I just wanted to give another view on the tech debate.

I doubt it would make any difference what sound card you are using to make the recording, as long as it fully supports the sound engine of the game, it stays in an untouched digital format.

The main area where cheap soundcards fail/show their cheapness is with the DAC and output section of the card, which only concerns itself with putting a voltage out to the speakers or headphones.


The only reason to make use of soundcard hardware would be to free up the cpu, and its the same with graphics cards, theres nothing your GPU can do that your cpu couldn't in software, the problem is you would be playing your games at 1fps or less.

I think were all just hoping that a merlin sounds like a merlin , a db sounds like a db and so on and that when heard in a flyby the doppler is on the money and all the rest, how cheap or expensive your audio setup is has little to do with the above.

+1000