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Does using sound from your graphics card reduce your fps in games?

Soldato
Joined
4 Nov 2002
Posts
2,973
Location
England - Leeds
Hi there, please can you give you advice, I was just wondering about this because I currently have this setup, the reason I'm doing this is because I bought a 5.1 surround sound system a while ago and couldnt work out how to output the sound from my sound card to the av reciever so I just plugged in a HDMI wire from the graphics card to the av and now I have sound and picture but because my frame rate isnt too good in battlefield 4 I was worried that I am shooting myself in the foot by doing this method?

Whats weird though is in large outdoor conquest maps I have good fps even in ultra settings in graphics but on smaller maps and inclosed places the frame rate drops from 50fps to 24fps.


Thanks in advance :)
 
Last edited:
That's an interesting question. I never even considered that the HDMI output from a graphics card would have audio attached, where is the audio being generated?

Which graphics card is it for a matter of interest, one of the new AMD ones?
 
You might be able to connect your AV receiver by the SPDIF out which is just under the top rear USB ports on my MB. Or there should be a manual explaining what wires go where like black yellow red etc go in what port but most are colour coded to the jack they go in. On a 5.1 system you might have to switch in line out/mic out into a line in via options but can be confusing at how ya do it.

Maybe your not getting frame drops as such maybe its signal distortion or high latency going from the gfx card through the receiver then to the monitor or something similar to the x1 passive hdmi through put when putting a PS4 through it doesnt work get drops lagging etc. Best to run the HDMI or a DVI to monitor then figure out the 5.1 speakers in the audio jacks on your mb itll be better.

Never tried running sound from it though not sure
 
You must lose something as the GPU is computing sound somewhere stealing resource/bandwidth from it.

Find out how to connect your dedicated soundcard to your AV receiver you may need to use an optical cable if your soundcard supports it & does not have a HDMI socket.
 
There should be no discernible loss in performance from using the graphic cards audio.

My guess is something else is causing your drop in frame rate. It's easy to test though. Try disconnecting the HDMI cable to you AVR (in other words, play BF3 without sound), and see if you still suffer the low frame rate indoors.
 
There should be no discernible loss in performance from using the graphic cards audio.

My guess is something else is causing your drop in frame rate. It's easy to test though. Try disconnecting the HDMI cable to you AVR (in other words, play BF3 without sound), and see if you still suffer the low frame rate indoors.

Thanks for all your replies, and yeah I'll try that tip mate thanks. Also I'll try opticle from my dedicated sound card to av reciever as didnt think of that before.

Also just to answer some earlier questions I have been outputting sound from my old ATI 5770 for the past year or so using HDMI and now I just upgraded to amd 7850 2GB and I'm currently outputting sound with HDMI again, it works really well tbh, I bet most people dont use sound from their graphics card but its decent, its basically like graphics cards are 2 in 1 these days as they have sound built in but I was just worried that this was reduces my fps in bf4.
 
I ran a test on metro last light a few weeks back. 3 benchmark runs with the HDMI audio enabled and 3 runs using the Xonar dg. (i disabled one whilst testing the other) There wasn't any difference in framerate, in fact the HDMI bench scored slightly more on average framerate.
 
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