I went from my built in nforce sound (which is meant to be really good) to an audigy 2 zs, and holy crap the difference is huge - and I am not even talking about sound.

Sure, the sound sounds 10x better, with things like EAX Advanced HD enabled, but it improves framerates dramatically.

The rail feels like a different weapon. Until now it felt really heavy, and had this kinda 'lag' feel whenever i shot it (not talking about connection lag), but now it is so smooth. RL and GL feel a lot better too, although not on such a large extent as the rail.

Seems like im promoting a product, but I am just blown away by the difference. Maybe I had sound problems before, but now the game feels so much smoother, i'm well happy.

So want more FPS in quake4? Do NOT get a new gfx card (especially if your config is tweaked, it will make 0 difference). Get a good GAMING sound card , and if you have that, then get new CPU. New gfx card should be the last thing on the list, unless the one you have is very crap (assuming you tweaked your gfx settings low).


Edit: Does using EAX Advanced HD reduce performance? it certainly sounds better, and even with it enabled, my performance is much better compared to what it was before i got the new sound card. But sound is great without advanced hd, so if it is a performance intensive feature, i would turn it off...?