just got my soundblaster extreme fatal1ty and i think its great. have it hooked up to bose 7.1 and sounds fantastic. sounds great in headphomes too. am running vista 64 and have had no driver problems. came with drivers for xp and vista. no in game problems either. blue ray discs are fine also. maybe im just lucky. love the THX controle pannel too.
Okay, have read about the net that a boycott of all creative goods has started. So, whats a good sound card that isnt a creative one?
I don't buy that reason. The process of getting surround audio off a disc generally doesn't involve the sound card whatsoever...but I'm going to stop there, because the EULA forbids discussion of ripping software. :)Quote:
Originally Posted by James
Besides, we are VERY far off from actually having support for a secure chain of transmission given that HDMI seems to be the only audio interface to actually support it and HDMI audio has just about 0% penetration in the PC market.
I may be mistaken...but I believe that the issue at hand is the Creative cards' ability to do DD/DTS passthrough and decoding in Vista, whereas the Auzentech cards additionally provide DDL/DTS encoding. These are VERY different things.Quote:
Originally Posted by Spank_Me_Hard
Surround sound from movies is generally encoded with DTS or DD, so in order to access this surround content you either need to decode it in the sound card and output it over an analog connection (i.e. the front/surround/sub & center plugs) or send it digitally via a passthrough to an external DD/DTS decoder (such as an AV receiver).
(This part I'm a bit shakier on, so someone please correct me if I am in error.) When you are gaming, the sound card is processing EAX effects on decoded sound. In order to output surround sound over a digital connection, you need to encode the sound using something like DDL so that the external receiver can understand it. You can send a non-surround signal over a digital connection just fine. You can send a surround signal over an analog connection just fine. You just can't send an unencoded surround signal over a digital connection (regardless of how much I wish you could).
The Creative cards support on-card surround decoding/passthrough in XP, whereas this functionality is currently broken in Vista. Daniel_k fixed this problem before Creative did, but Creative told him to stop distributing his drivers...which is why there is such an uproar.
Are you maybe mistaking OpenAL for DD? Would seem kind of strange for the game engine itself to be generating DD; that kind of low-level encoding is usually done by the sound processor. Also, AA is based on the Unreal Engine, so it very likely shares the same sound architecture as the Unreal games.Quote:
Originally Posted by ImaNihilist
Not necessarily...Quote:
That would explain why there are no PCI-E sound cards.
Here's one reason. There are bridge chips available now that will do a majority of the work required to convert a PCI card to PCIe, but it's still one extra part you have to pay for, make room on the card for, and compensate for electrically. Considering that it creates a non-trivial amount of design complexity and provides no actual benefit (since most people these days still have free PCI slots), I'd say that's the more likely reason why we haven't seen more PCIe sound cards.
Now, I'm not ruling out that Creative is creating a software EAX solution, but I hardly think that's the only reason that they aren't making many PCIe cards.
damn, a boycott? lol. i just dropped like $150 if i remember correctly(baught alot of parts :) ) on my creative card. wish i would have heard about this. i was going to get a diffrent card but james and a couple others suggested this one. its been a good card so far, but the service will go to crap if they lose their customer base. this card rocks though so oh well.
I've installed the kX driver and I don't intend to DL any X-Fi driver from Creative anymore....at least, until they'd released a proper driver that brings back the full function of my X-Fi's (same functionality as with XP). Until then, I'm gonna hang with this modded driver.....tried a few games already, no problem whatsoever. The more I think about it, the angrier I get.......I suspect Creative could have enable these features a long time back (unless the driver team is totally THAT inapt) but have not done so due to whatever reasons they have. If they were trying to push consumers into getting X-Fi's, the very least they can do is to fully support their cards......I've had enough of their half-baked, buggy and crippled drivers!
Edit - Geez, that thread in my first post has taken a life of its own! >2.2k replies as of now.:eek:
lol Yeah. We all were "OK" with Creative's drivers, as long as the hardware was decent.
Seems the next step is either Auzentech (Licenses creatives technology, but custom spins their drivers), or Asus' Xonar (a custom CMedia chip).
As of right now, the Xonar seems the better solution, as the drivers are cleaner, and they offer full EAX wrapper support through software. If you aren't familiar with EAX and Vista, Vista uses OpenAL for sound. EAX uses DirectSound (part of the DirectX package). Without DirectSound, there is no EAX in games. Creative offers a software package called ALchemy (get the OpenAL reference?), but it only "patches" certain games to work properly.
Asus' Xonar driver wrapper allows for all EAX games to be played with proper sound. It's more CPU intensive, but if the EAX effects are important to you, then it should be worth it.
As of right now, I will probably Mod my X-Fi and see if I can get better sound out of it. If I kill it in the process, I will either switch to onboard sound for the short term, or look at the Asus Xonar D2.
hahahahahahaQuote:
Originally Posted by ImaNihilist
The best part about that? EAX hardware acceleration isn't supported under Vista. EAX acceleration is tied to DirectSound, and Vista uses OpenAL. That's the reason Creative had to release ALchemy, and that Asus licensed Creative's EAX software, and created a wrapper for it in their drivers (DS3D GX). It basically allows the OpenAL driver to pass acceleration to the card for EAX effects. It has some CPU overhead, but it's not terrible. (1% or so)
Oh, and Candyman's right about the PCIe soundcard issue. Asus offers both a Xonar D2 (PCI), and a Xonar D2X (PCIe). The PCIe variant requires a floppy power connector. Why? Because the chip onboard is designed for PCI power delivery, not PCIe. So they had to mod the card, since that was cheaper than redesigning the onboard chip.
yeah I'm looking at the xonar myself...as more and more games start to use openal the switch to vista and a new sound card seems more likely
I'm pretty sure it was DD.Quote:
Originally Posted by Candyman
Ah! It was this, "NVIDIA(r) nForce(tm) or other motherboards/soundcards containing the Dolby(r) Digital Interactive Content Encoder required for Dolby Digital audio."
And yeah, I agree that there are probably an onslaught of reasons why there are no PCIe sound cards, but I don't buy the technical argument. Not from a company like Creative, anyway. They are masters of selling you crap you don't need. It would seem more in-line with them to create a PCIe card, and then market it as being a billion times superior to its PCI counterpart.
I'm pretty sure that that just means, "This game has surround audio, so you if your sound card supports Dolby Digital encoding, then you can turn that surround audio into a DD stream." Granted, that is a very strange way of saying it. At the time, Soundstorm was the only available solution for doing DD encoding from games.Quote:
Originally Posted by ImaNihilist
It's not just at the individual game level, though. If you have Soundstorm (or any other product that supports DDL), then you can get DD output from any game that has surround sound.
i was looking at the xonar 7.1 but everyone said "dont get that, get a soundblaster". lol. oh well. at least i get to see how creative is for myself. i havent been able to use my mic yet but everything else is steller.
back in 2002 i was in need of a replacement soundcard and settled on the Hercules Fortissimo III, which was pretty much the same as the Turtle Beach Santa Cruz. I am STILL using the card to this day and Hercules has even released Vista drivers for it last year. a SIX YEAR OLD card that is still supported. Creative can learn something here.
Alot of mobos have very nice built in sound these days. I havent used a sound card in a few years now, and never have with my new machine.Quote:
Originally Posted by LordVampyre