The software isn't required for use, but will open up functionality and controls for use with your PC. It runs in the form of the Sonic Studio similar to what we used with the Strix RAID DLX sound card. By default it had various audio enhancement options enabled after installation, including bass boost and the various microphone noise cancelling technologies. The virtual surround and reverb options were also enabled by default. This resulted in various strange and overly bassy audio signatures, so it is worth noting to adjust them to preference. For our main testing we disable all audio enhancements, then for gaming we enabled the virtual surround. Here, it is worth noting that it gives direct access to adjusting the sampling frequency to which the default is set to 44.1KHz, but unless there are known bugs with your games in regards to the audio, I would always recommend setting it to the highest available to improve the output audio quality.