The TR gang is having another look at the new CS: Source beta. This time they're putting the game's surround sound audio engine through its paces on nine different sound cards to see how in-game performance is affected. Interesting....

"Unlike the DOOM 3 engine, which currently processes positional audio on the CPU, the Source engine appears to take advantage of hardware 3D audio acceleration. In theory, leveraging sound card resources to crunch positional audio calculations should free up CPU resources and improve overall performance, but is there really much of a performance difference between audio implementations? We've rounded up nine different sound cards to find out."