Dang are you saying a threadripper or 9900k paired with a1080ti or 2080ti will still struggle with this game?
Threadripper will struggle because it has poor single thread performance (it is more aimed towards productivity with core count scaling applications). 9900k will absolutely eat it as it is the king/queen of single threaded performance. Yes you will encounter situations where frame rate is low, but those will be few and far between and likely the result of computationally impossible situations (eg 500 laser towers vs 300 defence drones).
That's the way the X games work. I remember getting an expansion sound card for X3 because taking the sound processing load off of my CPU got me +~10fps.
This sounds unlikely... Maybe there was more to it such as bad drivers or too complex sound environments? If using Vista or Windows 7 this would not be possible anyway since all sound was software computed. Only later did they add back hardware accelerated sound in the form of automatic sound channel offload.
Buzz2005 wrote: ↑Thu, 28. Mar 19, 13:33
would a dedicated sound card give better fps in x4, anyone have insight in this
Yes it will improve performance if running Windows 8 or 10 due to hardware acceleration. However only if the dedicated sound card offers actual hardware offload capabilities for modern Windows and is not just an audiophile high quality DAC. That said one is likely looking at a 1% performance increase at maximum because sound channel mixing involves very little data.
In the old days sound cards were critical for gaming performance since sound processing used a huge amount of CPU time. However CPUs are so fast now that similar sound processing (humans still hear the same...) takes very little if not insignificant processing time. Sound processing can even scale well with multiple cores unlike game logic.
Dedicated sound hardware these days is really only for audio enthusiasts looking for exceptional sound quality or specialist features.
And low power systems since dedicated hardware can deal with more channels or use less power per watt than a CPU. Similar reason as to why there is dedicated hardware to handle encryption, hashing, decompression, graphics, etc.
I believe the support forum actually recommended getting a expansion soundcard for X3, no way I would have thought of it myself. Back then the CPU had to spend processes on the sound and having single core/thread meant that would be processes that couldn't be used for the game.
For Windows Vista users it would make no difference as that did not support hardware acceleration of sound. For Windows XP users it would make a difference since the drivers for expensive cards might hardware accelerate the sound. This makes sense since Windows Vista users likely had multi core CPUs with higher instruction per cycle counts which trivialize sound processing than the XP users with older single core CPUs with low instructions per cycle counts.
In Windows Vista, sound is processed outside the calling thread by the kernel and mixers. It might not even block the calling thread while this happens. In newer OSes and if dedicated offload hardware is available then the kernel will push the channel data to that hardware (through driver code) to process and get the hardware to mix the results with any channels it could not offload and had to manually process.
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