$15 sound card gave me an amazing preformance boost?

[Collinsaurus]

I bought a Rosewill sound card off newegg on sale just because it was a good deal. Threw it in my budget gaming rig witch consist of, AMD 860k, zotac gtx 750 ti, 8 GB RAM, 1tb blue caviar, Cooler Master tx3 cpu cooler. And after the addition of the sound card my fps in far cry 4 went from 30-45 on medium/high settings. To a steady 60fps after the addition. How is this possible? From what I have heard of my many years in and around the pc world that sound cards have no effect on pc preformance and or they can slow your computer down due to junky drivers or junky hardware etc

 

[rgd1101]

they have some effect, but 15 fps? that are good and cheap upgrade.

 

[jazzy663]

I would like to know the answer to this as well. That's really quite amazing/odd. The only theory I can offer is that perhaps the sound card took some load off of the motherboard somewhere, freeing up some resources. Of course I highly doubt that, but, that's all I got for you, haha.

 

[spentshells]

What are your experiences with other games?

From what I am reading the uncompressed audio for the game is 21GB alone, normally I would say your situation sounds ridiculous, but that might just be the case here. Offloading The audio may be a good option.

Are you sure you didnt make any other changes? Perhaps updating video drivers or something? Were you previously running the audio over the HDMI?
That could make sense as it would free up processing power on the gpu ( which isnt much) but it also would free up a lot of video memory.

 

[Collinsaurus]

@spent shells other games get a small boost but not 15 fps. League of Legends which would get locked at 60 fps on high/ultra I see Flux up to 65. Skyrim got a small boost around 5 fps. The only other notable jump is on Dayz. I was getting 60 fps on medium/high and now it never drops below 60 and jumps to 70 or even a bit higher. And no I didn't make any other changes. And last nvidia update for my 750 tI was awhile ago.

@jazzy you think maybe my mobo ( which is a MSI a68-hme33 ) has just a terrible on board audio drive?