Unreal Tournament 3

Finally, we move on to a real-world benchmark to examine the performance hit of using 3D audio on the ASUS Xonar HDAV, in the form of Unreal Tournament 3 - Since this title supports the latest EAX Advanced HD functionality, we can see how the Xonar HDAV compares with both software and hardware 3D sound enabled, as well as any performance hit from utilising their DS3D GX feature to translate EAX calls to those compatible under Windows Vista.  To ensure that we're running in a CPU-limited situation to fully examine the performance impact of 3D audio on the sound card, this test has been rendered at a resolution of 1024x768 during a standard deathmatch.

Interestingly, switching on DS3D GX within the Xonar HDAV's control panel causes performance to increase when hardware audio acceleration is disabled within the game title itself.  However, enabling hardware audio acceleration within Unreal Tournament 3 gives us a better idea of the performance hit from handling EAX functionality - In the case of our particular configuration, performance drops by around 8% in this CPU-limited situation.  Of course, it's worth remembering that in a GPU-limited scenario, such performance drops will be far less noticeable, making this result very much a worst-case scenario for this board.

Subjective testing

While benchmarks and charts serve their purpose and are all well and good, at the end of the day the worlds of audio and video quality are rather subjective ones, and vary wildly from person to person.  Of course, I can't tell any of you reading this how you personally will find using the Xonar HDAV, but I can at least impart my own thoughts upon proceedings, which is what I intend to do in this next section, after wading through a plethora of gaming, movie and video watching and music listening using ASUS' offering.  So, how did I find the experience?

Everyday PC usage

I have to confess, my first impressions of the Xonar HDAV while just browsing around a Windows desktop and the like weren't all that great.  For starters (and to be fair it isn't only the Xonar I've seen do this), using the optical output together with Dolby Digital Live or DTS Interactive functionality with desktop sounds enabled causes encoding to activate and then deactivate every time you open up a new folder or the like - On our particular speakers, this also caused a click as the audio stream started, which became very irritating pretty quickly.  This didn't happen when we routed the audio via HDMI, but it was still an annoyance, to the point where I decided to turn off these sounds altogether.

My second initial reaction was that video quality was awful, with the desktop looking particularly washed out on our Dell 3008WFP monitor.  Thankfully, this really wasn't much of an issue, as a couple of minutes of adjusting values and trying profiles within the Xonar's Splendid HD driver control panel, coupled with a bit of monitor tweaking, soon got us back to a clear, well balanced and decent-looking desktop.  The moral of this particular story is to spend some time configuring everything to your satisfaction before you pass judgement on the video quality of the hardware.

Lastly, while we're discussing the negatives of the HDAV, we did have a couple of occasions where the video signal dropped out entirely and refused to come back for no reason, forcing us to reboot the system.  On one occasion this happened while I was reconfiguring the output of audio from HDMI to the optical output, but the other was during gameplay while enjoying Unreal Tournament 3.  Hopefully these are just some odd driver bugs that will be ironed out as the product and its software matures, but it's another little annoyance that could become a big one on this occasion if it were to cause data loss or the like.

Music

We've praised ASUS' Xonar parts for their music playback quality in the past, and we can only really do so again in the same fashion here - The numerous capabilities on offer in the Xonar allows for your music listening to be configured to your personal tastes, from choosing whether to output a Dolby Digital or DTS signal to upmixing the audio to eight channels, although as always trying to use the card's Virtual Speaker functionality to upmix the audio stream is a hit and miss affair that works better with some genres of music than others.  Overall though, using Dolby Digital Live or DTS Interactive to encode the audio as multi-channel sound works excellently, and the quality of whatever music we threw at the HDAV was crisp and clear.

Movies and video

Both DVD and Blu-Ray movie playback is excellently catered for by the Xonar HDAV from an audio point of view, with support for the full gamut of audio technologies which can be utilised by both media to give an experience just as the move makers intended provided you have a sufficiently capable receiver and speaker system.  Sadly, we don't have a receiver that can make use of full Dolby TrueHD and the like here at Elite Bastards, but using standard Dolby Digital and DTS playback still offered a fantastic audio experience.

Blu-Ray image quality was also similarly top-notch via the Xonar HDAV, producing excellent High Definition images at 1080p resolution right out of the box.  DVD playback took a little more tweaking of Splendid HD profiles within the Xonar's driver control panel to get just right, and I can't honestly say I saw any upscaling benefits from DVD playback using the Xonar, but overall the image was as good as you'd expect from DVD quality media once I'd played with the driver's video quality sliders for a while.

Gaming

Overall, we found that no real tweaking to the Splendid HD control panel was required to make our gaming experiences with the Xonar HDAV look any better, and perhaps more importantly despite ploughing through several titles we didn't notice any latency or lag issues from the video signal having to make the extra 'hop' from graphics board to display device.

On the audio side, I've always found using Dolby Digital Live or DTS Interactive a joy in gaming situation, and that remains the case here.  As far as environmental audio goes, ASUS' DS3D GX software still seems a little hit and miss support-wise, with the ability to turn on hardware acceleration in Race Driver: GRID (have I ever mentioned how this game has the best menu music ever?) conspicuous by its absence, while it worked perfect in other titles like Unreal Tournament 3.  Even without said environmental audio, the immersiveness of the in-game audio experience remained very good with the Xonar HDAV in use.