PCIe vs USB Audio Interfaces

[erek]

"As for latency; yes, there’s definitely a difference, as PCI/PCIe has a high speed connection directly to the computer chipset, rather than via USB or 1394 interfaces, which are a bit like network interfaces. Even if the USB/1394 devices may have DMA on the PCI/PCIe side (meaning they read and write data without CPU intervention), there’s still added buffering and a slower serial connection between the hub and the sound interface, which invariably adds latency."

https://forum.professionalcomposers.com/t/pcie-vs-usb-audio-interfaces/2477/2

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I've got a Focusrite 2i4 USB Audio Interface, but for gaming should i stick with the On-board Realtek HDA?

 

[LukeTbk]

Looking at ping result between USB wifi adapter and PCI-e network adapter.... not so sure how big the difference would be, specially for something that does not require anything particularly good like sound.

http://forums.ni.com/attachments/ni/240/4476/1/latency.jpg

I really doubt an human would be able to tell difference, specially for sound (your brain reorder heared sound with the subjective difference to make it match with your reality a lot, i.e. you don't feel sound timing has you hear it and the difference could be in low ten's of millisecond).

USB or HDMI for gaming sound is quite common.

 

[OFaceSIG]

I was not impressed with audio on my mobo. I was a Soundblaster user for years with my last card of theirs being an X-Fi Ti HD. I thought surely after all these years onboard audio can't suck that bad right? It wasn't "bad" but the amp on my mobo was weak. I felt I had the volume slider way higher then it should be. I scored a Creative X3 USB DAC refurbed from Creative. I no longer think a sound card is necessary. This DAC with good headphones is more than enough for a gamer.

 

[Mchart]

If you have human noticeable latency from any standard USB DAC - You have some other serious issues with the system causing latency issues.

Ever since moving to a high-end USB DAC for my gaming rig, I haven't looked back at sound cards. Something like a Schiit Hel will blow away any sound card. Also, keep in mind, with the changes to the OS that happened with Windows Vista/7, you aren't gaining anything special when it comes to hardware anymore doing 3D audio DSP. You can purchase Dolby Atmos, etc and get full virtual surround support without any special drivers, etc.

Also, keep in mind, most sound cards these days are still USB anyways. It's just a PCI-E card that just presents to the system as USB anyways.

 

[NattyKathy]

For gaming- onboard optical output to external DAC

For content creation- USB audio interface

I have used a USB audio interface as a headphone amp for gaming but it's kind of overkill and can introduce system latency issues.
(an aside- on Ryzen systems, the USB ports directly connected to the CPU perform significantly better for USB audio than the other chipset)

 

[Sycraft]

So technically PCIe interfaces are going to be able to get you lower latency, particularly at higher loads. It is closer to the CPU/memory, less overhead to go through.

However, as a practical matter, the quality of the interface/driver is what matters far more. RME interfaces on USB get numbers better than plenty of others on PCIe. There's a dude on Gearspace who does extensive tests and digs way in to this. It is fairly technical but you can look at the overall rankings to get a feel for things. The long and the short of it is that while the top two cards are PCIe, there are plenty of others way up on the list that are not and do nearly as well, and ones that are that do poorly.

Two examples from the list:

1) The RME Fireface UFX+ is on the list twice once for thunderbolt, which is more or less PCIe over a wire, and one for USB3. The TB entry is a little higher, but only slightly. It performs almost as well in USB3 mode. Both can run 32 sample buffers, and so on.

2) The ESI MAYA44e is a PCIe card and one of the lowest performers on the list. To be sure, this is not a current card, it has been discontinued, but here's an internal PCIe card, yet is gets smoked by even most lower performance USB interfaces.


In terms of gaming, latency is really no longer an issue as WASAPI shared mode introduces a large amount of latency and that's what most games use. The onboard Realtek chips do fine, processing wise, and actually for the few things that know how to properly address them in exclusive mode (like Cakewalk from Bandlab) they can have really low latency. They just don't tend to be hooked up to good electronics on the analogue side and so often don't sound great. They can be, some motherboards have good headphone amps and such, but many don't. My Dell at work hissed in my headphones, so I got it a soundcard.

Personally for gaming I use my RME interface, there's no reason not to. It does pro audio well, it does consumer audio well. I have no reason to change it around. I used to use a Soundblaster XFi back in the day for games because of hardware acceleration and EAX, but those days are long gone. Everything is done in software these days. So I have my pro interface do it all. If I'm doing headphone gaming I use Redscape which I then have speak ASIO to the RME.