game audio (pipewire vs alsa vs windows audio) which is better?

[hunter]

I use ubuntu 22.04 with alsa audio, I listen that the audio of the wither 3 on windows 10 is better than on ubuntu 22.04, I wanted to know if i updating ubuntu to a version with pipewire to have better audio or nothing changes.

[Der tüddelige Fußgänger]

Technically, you're going to use alsa regardless. Pipewire and Pulse just use communicate with alsa as far as I know.

From my experience, I don't hear any difference between Windows and Linux w/ Pipewire.

[hunter]

Originally posted by Felix:

Technically, you're going to use alsa regardless. Pipewire and Pulse just use communicate with alsa as far as I know.

From my experience, I don't hear any difference between Windows and Linux w/ Pipewire.

I use a Logitech 2.1 with Sound Blaster Z card and there is a difference in quality between Windows 10 and Ubuntu 22.04, and I wanted to understand if I get any improvements by upgrading to an Ubuntu version with Piperwire, what do you recommend?

Is the difference in quality perhaps due to the sound blaster software I installed in Windows 10?

[Der tüddelige Fußgänger]

Originally posted by hunter:

Is the difference in quality perhaps due to the sound blaster software I installed in Windows 10?

This could very well be the case.
I am not an audio guy myself. I generally just want stuff to work and not sound terrible. But I would maybe try searching for audio software first and trying to tweak it to your liking, then maybe try installing pipewire if that doesn't work out for you. Ubuntu 22.04 already comes with Pipewire in its repos, though given it being almost 2 years old, it's a bit older.

If nothing helps and you don't want to re-install anything, I would personally try upgrading to Ubuntu 23.10 which should come with a more recent version of pipewire. You could always upgrade to the next 24.4 LTS and stay there once it releases.

Edit: I am not an expert, take all of that with a giant, not so grainy, grain of salt.

[Marlock]

Originally posted by Felix:

Technically, you're going to use alsa regardless. Pipewire and Pulse just use communicate with alsa as far as I know

Pipewire includes a drop-in replacement to part of ALSA (alsa-lib, not the kernel parts) along PulseAudio and JACK replacements and its own new API

iirc the new alsa-lib replacement is a much needed rewrite from the grounds up, and was a first priority developing Pipewire


trivia:
ALSA is the more basic of those linux sound APIs and was pretty poorly coded (because it grew over many years of quick hacks on top of quick hacks, devices require software solutions for hardware quirks, etc, not due to incompetence or such)

when PulseAudio was born (created to drive over ALSA) it took the blame for a lot of crashes, errors and misbehaviours due to bugs that were actually in ALSA

[Marlock]

Originally posted by hunter:

Is the difference in quality perhaps due to the sound blaster software I installed in Windows 10?

That software probably applies some audio filters by default (eg: chamber resonance) that make you perceive audio as better

it might also default to a higher audio sampling frequency (Hz)

[Enigmatic]

Originally posted by Marlock:

when PulseAudio was born (created to drive over ALSA) it took the blame for a lot of crashes, errors and misbehaviours due to bugs that were actually in ALSA

ALSA revolves around hacking around hardware.
ALSA is poorly documented as such.
Errors in ALSA are rare, usually if something isn't running properly out of the box these days it's hardware related not ALSA itself.

Some how Lennart Pottering said he'd break your audio. He works at microsoft. But really I see more issue in the manufacturing side like Realtek. For instance I/O on pin straps Audio out and In could be physically wired so it works in reverse.

Be mindful of the Audio chip on your board. A good server actually would need a PCI sound card for that kind of stuff. Sound Blaster is good one bro.

[hunter]

I like the audio I have but in Windows it's a little better! I'm curious if a Linux system with piperwire is better in quality

[WarnerCK]

Originally posted by hunter:

I like the audio I have but in Windows it's a little better! I'm curious if a Linux system with piperwire is better in quality

Pipewire won't change anything: it's still the same audio signal. What Pipewire would help with (which JACK has, and Pulse and bare ALSA don't have) is having an easier way to plumb audio through a DSP like EQ, or reverb, or whatever, like the SoundBlaster software would on Windows.

[Marlock]

iirc pipewire can also transparently choose better defaults for an audio stream and processes this differently from PulseAudio...

i'm pretty sure it enables low latency audio to happen even when negotiated through the PulseAudio protocol, which was impossible and made people who needed this use JACK

but please don't take my word for it, i'm not an expert and i'm just pullung this from memory from past news readings

here's where you can check those things for yourself
https://pipewire.org/