I tried searching around and couldn't find much, but I was floored by the results. I've been working with DAW's for 25 years and never thought to test out the onboard audio in respect to CPU usage.

Here's a little background:

-Lenovo T495
-FL Studio
-Lots of CPU hungry VST's like Serum and Vital

Had a project that was tapping out my CPU. I recently packed up all my belongings and went on an extended trip. I don't have my normal music making equipment and needed to settle with the bare minimum. I started working with the on-board audio and low and behold: THE PROJECT NOW PLAYS AT AROUND 65% CPU!

Connect a Focusrite Scarlett and it's right back up to 100%. Now I understand that the Realtek chip probably has faster access to RAM and whatnot, but I never assumed for second that the performance increase would be THIS pronounced. Have I been unfairly downplaying the capabilities of on-board audio all this time? i mean, I used to stack old school Soundblasters into 486's back in the day. I've been telling people for years to ditch the on-board stuff and get an interface.

I will add one more thing, I did force the install of the Realtek ASIO driver onto my T495. The ASIO component is not stock on Lenovo laptops.

Anyone else ever experience this?

 

I once made a similar experience. Soundblaster X-Fi (PCI) performed better than a USB Steinborg interface. But I can't recall the driver I used at all.

 

Last edited: Nov 3, 2023

For good measure I also used the "FL Studio ASIO" on the Realtek and it performed only slightly worse with about 5% more CPU, but still, the Scarlett couldn't even play the project without topping out.

 

Internally connected will always perform the best, it had even bigger impact in the past I would say.

I haven’t even compared the performance difference in my systems but I use RME drivers and they are among the better usb performance around, so probably I would not see a huge difference, but it got me curious though

 

This has been posted in other threads here, but:

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/download/739787/realtek-high-definition-audio-driver-for-windows-10-64-bit-and-windows-11-for-intel-nuc12-pro-kits-mini-pcs-nuc12ws.html

I get very low latency with the ASIO driver. I'm still looking around for any info that others have posted about using on-board audio. Don't get me wrong, I may run into some issues further down the line, but for now, I'm simply happy that I can work on projects with a set of headphones and a laptop. I may find that amplification is a factor when I try to output the project directly from the laptop, but so far, I haven't had a chance.

 

Onboard audio hasn't really sucked for a while already, I wonder when they will start shipping motherboards capable of phantom power. Haven't tested it in my B550, but I can run fairly heavy sessions at 64 samples without issues with the Yamaha Steinberg drivers.

 

This comes as a revelation to me. It just goes to show what can fly under one's radar by simply not experimenting only sticking with the tried and true.

 

You didn't mention which gen Scarlett you have, but I've owned one 1 or 2nd gen Scarlett and couldn't get decent performance nor latency, so sold it after 1 month trying and went back to PCI M-Audio Delta 1010 back in the day

 

I'm using a gen3 8i6. I've heard the drivers are not the most efficient. So maybe that's the issue. I also have an M-Audio Delta 66 packed up in storage. Even to this day the drivers have worked on all iterations of Windows. It is currently installed in a Windows 10 machine and performs wonderfully.

I am seriously going to rethink my interface situation going forward. When I am finally able to get back to my desktop computers I will run a test with the on-board audio interfaces, but somehow I don't think I will get the same performance benefits as I do with the laptops, but we shall see.

Right now my mobile setup consists of my Lenovo T495, some ATH-M50x headphones, a Roland SonicCell, and an Akai Fire for MIDI control. I also have access to a Roland A49 for keys. I modded the Roland driver for Windows 11 and it works well (so far). I've found that pairing down my resources is very good for creativity.

 

I've always thought that from a hardware point of view (integrated, pci and that jazz) should have better latency.
But since I don't know about external audio interfaces I don't talk about what I don't know. Ok, sometimes I do

My point being this makes sense. But is a complex subject and may depend on several factors.

 

True dat. I have to do more tests and see what happens. This could all be due to one power hungry synth. I know that Vital can be very resource hungry when you start stacking those voices with long release times.