To my knowledge, there is no such things as low latency sound card and I wonder how it would mather for a gamer.
If we go in the recording gear, there are plenty of choices.
Focusrite, presonus and others.
I love RME products.

It matters, because auditory reactions in humans are faster than visual ones, so each millisecond your sound card is faster is a millisecond subtracted from your reaction time to things with an audio cue.

Shouldn't there be differences in the way they handle playback? I'm using direct audio and I'm getting about 30-50ms of lag on the sound with an internal buffer of 8ms, which I attributed most of to the soundcard.

pingasman, post: 453986, member: 50925 wrote: It matters, because auditory reactions in humans are faster than visual ones, so each millisecond your sound card is faster is a millisecond subtracted from your reaction time to things with an audio cue.

Interesting..
I would think that game builders would put a latency compensation, that would make sens since many music software do.
In any case, you can research audio recording audio interfaces. They are way faster.. but it also depends on the drivers and how the game talks to them.
When recording audio, most of use asio drivers, if some game support asio, that would be a blast ! ;)

I can see where latency would matter, but I'm not sure you'd get low latency with "typical" sound cards that are cheap. Also, your CPU and RAM are going to play a big factor in latency as well.
The thing is, this is a pro audio recording forum, so we don't really even consider soundcards of the Soundblaster, Realtek, or similar varieties. These aren't even remotely close to the quality and conversion caliber that we use in daily audio production work, so we don't really know much about them - other than that they suck for what we do. LOL. ;)

Your best bet may be to look at an entry level USB audio preamp/converter/i-o, and you could pick one up for as little as $89 or so ... but for that scenario, part of what you would be paying for is the mic inputs and preamps - and unless you're a gamer who uses something like headset mic communication for game play, you'd likely never use that part of the device.
IMO, your best bet is to probably go to a gaming site or forum; we're not blowing you off or trying to be evasive, we just have a much different type of audio quality criteria than gamers do.
I/O cards are used in pro audio production, but they aren't the cheap cards that people use for typical daily use such as streaming, YouTube vids or games. They're hi quality conversion cards, many of which are priced in the thousands of dollars.
But again, your CPU and memory are also going to affect quality and latency, regardless of what type of I/O you end up with.
FWIW
-d.

Thanks for the hint, I'll look ask around some gaming forums too.

If you want lowest latency, go for a PCIe plug-in audio card of whatever quality. USB devices suffer from the enforced latency of the computer's USB I/O sysrem.

As a gamer myself, I’ll plus one Boswell’s advice. I’ve used mostly soundblaster cards when I built gaming pcs way back. Really can’t go wrong. PCIe all the way.