BF2S Forums Hardware or software rendering (audio, BF2)?

Audio Renderer: This setting determines the type of audio device which is used to playback the sounds in the game. The options are Software, Hardware and Creative X-Fi. The Software renderer is the most basic, and provides adequate, at times scratchy sound quality, but gives the best performance for most machines. The Hardware option should be chosen if you have dedicated sound hardware, and provides good quality audio with a slight performance drop. The Creative X-Fi setting provides the best audio quality and should only be used by people who own Creative X-Fi Hardware, otherwise selecting this setting will cause problems so leave it unticked.

In general, I recommend Hardware audio renderer if you have any form of sound card in your system and the option is available in BF2. Note however that many popular sound cards don't support this option in BF2 (See the Readme.txt file in your \Program Files\EA Games\Battlefield 2\Support\ directory for a full list.) If your card supports it I recommend enabling it - the positioning of sounds is a very important advantage in Battlefield 2, and having Software audio with low quality sound (See Sound Quality below) will make the sounds very unrealistic, and make it very difficult for you to determine enemy positions correctly.