Does Virtual Surround Sound Affect My In-Game FPS?

With all the surround sound apps out there, choosing just one can be difficult. It’s especially difficult when considering that any hardware or software can cause extra stress on your CPU, disk drives, or memory depending upon many factors. Let’s take a look at how these three common performance factors can be affected, and how the right virtual surround sound software and settings can be a perfect match for gaining a split-second advantage.

Diagnosing CPU Slowdowns

So your PC has started slowing down while playing a game. Sometimes the source of the problem is overheating, sometimes it’s your set up trying to conserve battery. Whatever the reason, sudden issues in your gaming experience — like frame rate dropping — are usually caused by CPU slowdowns. If after you adjust the game’s resolution your frame rate doesn’t improve, your game’s performance is likely limited by CPU performance.

Diagnosing Disk Drive Slowdowns

During gameplay, games sometimes need to read or write data. If your disk drive responds quickly, then disk accesses will prevent any noticeable frame rate hitches. If not, the game can pause for as long as it takes the drive to respond.

Diagnosing Insufficient Memory

Games like Apex Legends and Call of Duty use large amounts of memory. Even machines with 4 GB of memory or more can run low. This perfect storm can cause your game to be swapped to disk, which causes frame rate hitches. Moreover, if Windows doesn’t have many GB of free RAM, it cannot cache, meaning loading takes much longer.

How Does Audio Royale Help Prevent These Problems?

Audio Royale’s main purpose is to allow you to hear 5.1 and 7.1 surround sound, as the game-developers intended — without any additional hardware or software, and without wasting precious computing resources. Our awesome spatial processing engine (previously only available to the entertainment and film industries) has been optimized to the fullest to offer you a simple, intuitive, and easy-on-the-PC gaming experience. Here’s just a few of the many steps we’ve taken as we brought this tech to gamers.

  • SIMD Optimization: We actually took the time to write our own assembly-language code that acts directly with the operating system to make everything more efficient.
  • Custom-tuning: Audio Royale was built with Battle Royale and first-person shooter games in mind, meaning we’ve played hours of Fortnite, Apex Legends, and COD: Warzone in order to understand the “sound” of first-person-shooter/Battle Royale games.
  • Flexibility: You can toggle the Visualizer, Meters, and EQ on and off, in order to completely minimize the processing power of Audio Royale.
  • Low-Latency: By building our own driver, we’ve completely minimized latency. Whatever latency you have with stereo headphones or audio playback, the bandwidth required to achieve that latency with surround headphones can be 3–4 times higher.

All of these features allow Audio Royale to have the lowest impact on your current setup, seamlessly integrating with your gaming rig. Together, your multichannel audio routing is prioritized by the OS and custom SIMD optimized code provides a minimal latency FPS-optimized experience In other words, low FPS is a problem with the game’s performance on your computer. If you’re experiencing computer slowdowns take a look at this article for help optimizing your PC. And if you want to try out virtual surround software for yourself, try a free trial of Audio Royale here.