🚀 go-pugleaf

The performance of my new Audigy LS card is very poor, even given its
role as Creative's "lower-priced" card.

Games like URU and Simpsons Hit & Run show noticeable slowness when
the sound is enabled at its default settings. URU is virtually
unplayable unless I turn off EAX and reduce the number of sounds to
low or medium. I understand that this is not a true relative to the
Audigy line of products, and that EAX (at least) is not
hardware-accelerated on this card, plus I am using this on a low-end
PC (1.4 Ghz Celeron, 640 MB, Win XP), but it still shouldn't be this
bad, should it?

In testing, Audio WinBench 99 (v 1.0.1) reports between 32% and 55%
CPU utilization, depending on the severity of the test. RightMark 3D
CPU utilization test reports between 20% and 40%. This seems
unbelievably high! The one LS review I found, from a non-mainstream
site, was seeing the expected 2-5% (which is what I get with my old
Diamond MX-300 Aureal card), so I wonder if there's some
incompatibility with my PC setup. I have tried turning off all
non-essential tasks and background processes, with little improvement.
I fully uninstalled and reinstalled the drivers, and saw little if any
improvement. I also tried the recently released drivers, with no
improvement.

I've also tried removing some of my PCI cards, moving the Audigy to a
new slot that sould lessen the need for sharing IRQs, as suggested by
Creative Tech Support, and disabled every device except the Audigy and
the video. (Although I do wonder whether turning off a device in the
Device Manager is the same as removing the card from the slot...) I
get some slight improvements, but still see the same problems in
games, and get 20% or worse CPU utilization in all Audio WinBench 99
and RightMark 3D CPU utilization tests. Even basic, non-EAX tests show
this, and even when the Audigy card IRQ is not shared with anything
else.

Are these consistent with any other owners' tests, or is there
something that can fix this problem? Has anyone with this card run
either or both of these benchmarks? If so, can you post your results?