Auzentech X-Fi Forte Low Profile 7.1 PCI-E Sound Card

Gaming – testing

I tested a wide range of games to see how the card coped with each game. FPS graphs below are from a small selection. Note that when EAX advanced options could be turned on, they were.

 

I have included results from Auzentech X-Fi Prelude to give you a rounded set of results.

Unreal Tournament 3

An Unreal Engine 3 game as it is a fast, frantic and furious multi player mash-up experience. Using advanced DirectX 9.0c features, the Unreal Engine looks fantastic and has a lot of explosions all around to give that feeling of depth. PhysX was not enabled in-game.

Settings: 1920 x 1200, Very high settings. The UT3 Benchmark was used for all cards.

 

The Forte matches its big brother, the Prelude in the first of our FPS tests.

 

Again the Forte’s X-Fi chip runs ahead of the non-X-Fi based cards and even a little ahead of the Prelude.

 

Quake 4

Quake 4 is a game built on the Doom 3 engine. This uses many DX 9.0c features based on OpenGL game. Once again I did three benchmark runs on Quake 4 on each card and took the average of all my readings from these. The Quake4Bench demo was used to benchmark all cards.

Settings were: 1920 x 1200, Ultra settings. 16 x AF, 4 x AA. Multi-CPU enabled.

 

The Forte performed very well in these Quake 4 tests as we would expect.

 

The surround sound EAX processing does very well in keeping the FPS up on the Forte.