Has anybody measured in-game sound latency with various drivers, virtualizers and sound-cards?
Found it! Japanese 4Gamer.net does sound card latency measurements on Windows platform using a unified methodology. This will give you an idea of a rough latency in best case (no additional DPI latency from over crowded USB/chipset).
Here's a short summary of some tested cards:
Code:
Razer Seirē Elite MIC -23 ms (DirectSound vs Fireface UCX)
ROG Strix Fusion 500 -18 ms (DirectSound vs Fireface UCX)
BenQ Zowie Vital -13 ms (WASAPI vs Fireface UCX)
BenQ Zowie Vital -1 ms (DirectSound vs Fireface UCX)
RME Fireface UCX 0 ms (baseline, not absolute measurement)
Creative Sound Blaster ZxR 0 ms (baseline 2, not absolute measurement)
Logitech G433 7.1 (wired) 2 ms (WASAPI vs Fireface UCX)
SteelSeries Arctis Pro/GameDAC 4 ms (DirectSound vs ZxR)
Logitech G433 7.1 (wired) 7 ms (DirectSound vs Fireface UCX
Sennheiser GSX 1000 2 ms (WASAPI vs Fireface UCX)
Sennheiser GSX 1000 11 ms (DirectSound vs Fireface UCX)
Creative Sound Blaster K3+ 13 ms (DirectSound) vs. Fireface UCX
Astro MixAmp Pro TR 16 ms (WASAPI vs. ZxR)
Audeze Mobius 18 ms (DirectSound vs. ZxR)
Creative Sound BlasterX G6 48 ms (DirectSound vs. ZxR)
Creative SXFI Amp 55 ms (DirectSound vs. ZxR)
SteelSeries Arctis 7 99 ms (DirectSound vs. Fireface UCX)
Yes, it is not much and there are two baseline cards which makes it more confusing.
However, what is apparent from the results they've done so far is:
- Directsound has more latency (on the average) than WASAPI (fairly obvious)
-
USB cards do NOT always have more latency than PCIe cards (EDITED)
- enabling 3D sound virtualization (SXFI, Dolby Atmos, etc) on the sound card increases the latency
-
extra sound card latency can be anything from
0 to 6 frames (on a 60Hz screen) (EDITED)
- this latency is ON TOP of what is already the sound processing latency in the game + in windows inherently (which is usually in dozens OR up to hundreds of milliseconds)
In summary: there is still WAY TOO MUCH latency in Audio on Windows for FPS gaming with 120+ Hz screens and on-time audio cues. I hope the industry and reviewers will pay more attention to this in the future. This is one area of performance, where newer technology is actually often times quite a lot slower (longer latencies) than older technology.
EDIT: Added more cards/headsets from the 4gamer.net testing.