I have personally noticed a big difference between onboard sound & my X-FI Gamer add in card. The sound quality is much better with an add in card. But with that said I keep hearing that if you have Vista your sound cards dont sound nearly as good as they did in XP because Microsoft handicapped the sound bus, is that true? Creative offers some software that "tries" to fix this to allow you to listen to real EAX.

Don't know about shitsta but on-card processors have always been better than software rendering in xp, iirc.

People still buy Creative?

Good lord...



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http://ghosts.nin.com/

I remember back in the days of A3D and early EAX. I never really "got" some of the features they offered--the effects just made Quake 2 and system sounds and so on sound terrible.

I've had a Plantronics USB audio device for years, now, and it's always done its job rather well. The only thing I miss is the software device that piped the speaker output to the recording input.

@NIN

Gamer's that enjoy high end audio while playing there games usually buy creative. If you just play Peggle you should be fine with the onboard sound. I take it your a casual gamer?

I had an Audigy 2 for a bit. Didn't really notice any difference in sound when it was working. It crackled a lot. I tried drivers, forum help, etc, but could never find a solution to the problem. It was only some games that did it. I finally removed the whole thing during an upgrade and haven't regretted it.

I don't consider myself too casual of a gamer, either.

Vista fails to support hardware sound properly because EVERY singly high quality sound is compressed and then uncompressed. It really SUCKS. Vista is a huge step backwards.

Fucking DRM. If you want decent Hardware sound in your games a Creative FX card and XP is still the way to go.

The question becomes if this claim by ASUS is so easily refuted then why was it made? And how many other claims has ASUS made that are not based in fact?

To answer the question posed by Veng3ance (how do you pronounce that anyway?...Veng-three-ance?) audio sounds just fine on Vista, possibly better than it does on XP. It is only that the audio stack was moved out of the OS kernal - ostensibly to enhance OS stability - which disabled hardware acceleration of EAX effects.
This isn't an issue because of several reasons: 1, Creative's OpenAL-based ALchemy initiative resolves much of that by redirecting DirectSound calls to the sound card which restores hardware acceleration to your X-Fi/Audigy based card and 2, it can be argued that with software based solutions such as the FMOD audio engine (think Crysis) EAX is no longer necessary.
Much of this information can be googled to your heart's content if you want to read more.

Bottom line: Audio on Vista is doing quite well, thank you very much.
For the record I use an X-Fi Elite Pro while running XP on my game machine. Maybe with my next system build I'll make the jump to Vista. I'm just not in a hurry to make that jump.

This comment was edited on Mar 25, 09:37.

the irony with sound in vista is that MS could've easily written a wrapper for directsound using its new X-audio API.

I'm not sure of the point your trying to make but DRM has nothing to do with reproducing game audio.
I'll also assume you meant "X-FI" rather than "FX".

And your claim that "every high quality sound is compressed, then uncompressed" needs some explanation. Can you provide one or at least some links that may shed some light on this?

Here is a link to Creative's website that explains the company's views on Vista (pun intended) and what steps they are taking to deal with this situation:

http://forums.creative.com/creativelabs/board/message?board.id=Vista&thread.id=1694

This comment was edited on Mar 25, 09:50.

I take it your a casual gamer?

No, I buy Turtle Beach.

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http://ghosts.nin.com/

Perhaps, but why should they?

EAX hasn't been relevant for years. In fact sound seems to have been one of the most overlooked aspects in games. We've had huge advances in graphics and physics but sound has been overlooked. Also, AI seems to have done very little as well. I was very impressed by the soldiers in the original Half-Life but nothing has really impressed me since. People mention FEAR but I didn't notice anything radical there and even the AI in Crysis is simply terrible.

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Founder of the "I Hate Smiley Fitz" society

Remember: Riley has autism. He has trouble communicating, and in an overstimulating
environment, he can get frightened and run away, leaving his parents frantic. - Auburn

Creative sucks. Period. I've had more blue screens because of the Audigy-2 than any other piece of hardware I've ever owned. I ended up swapping it out for a M-Audio revo 7.1 temporarily until something better came along.

Something better did come along. I picked up a Razer Barracuda AC-1 Gaming Audio Card at a discount from woot.com. And no, that's not a casual gamer sound card.

http://forums.creative.com/creativelabs/board/message?board.id=Vista&thread.id=1694

Good to see creative up-to-date as usual!

"Vista itself is still in the final stages of testing, and is not yet at code-freeze."

@ NIN
I have a Turtle Beach 5.1 headset & LOVE that headset. Turtle Beach & Razor make good quality items.

Meanwhile thousands of X-Fi's still crackle uncontrollably on nforce4 motherboards. Creative offers almost no support whatsoever to those unlucky enough to land one of their products.

My main reason for getting the X-Fi was simply framerates. Popping in a hardware solution rather then software gained me an extra 10% performance on my old gaming rig. And was far more effective then any other upgrade for the same money.

It's also quite handy tou have your gaming headset plugged into you onboard sound and still have music coming from the addon if your in a 6 hour raid or similar.

This comment was edited on Mar 25, 11:02.

Creative hardware is good (when they're honest about the specs..), but the software\drivers horrific.

Since the beginning of time Creative Lab's cards have sucked. Unfortunately, you were more or less stuck with them in the DOS days because everybody supported them because they were the first consumer sound-card that supported digital audio.

Still, they're common, so I've ended up owning pretty much all of them going back to the Sound Blaster Pro. They're much like the Microsoft of sound cards. There is much better stuff out there, but it's just easier to buy what everyone else buys and everyone else buys them because that's what everyone else bought.

There have been glimmers of hope: GUS, A3D, nForce- all much better than Creative, but ended up swamped by CL's market dominance.

Their drivers are awful, they can't stick to a spec, I can't count the number of times drastic performance deficiencies, crashing and stuttering have come down to my Creative Labs cards- even games with Creative Lab's EAX logo on the box. "Lower your sound acceleration to basic" is such common troubleshooting advice it's automatically a part of most FAQs.

I have heard that the X-Fi isn't all that bad though. I wouldn't buy one for sure, not for another generation or so, but it's nice to at least see movement in the right direction. I imagine Vista sort of spoils that party though, a whole new driver spec for Creative to botch.