Slightly alongside topic rather than off-topic, but how many here are using XFi sound cards in Vista with G80 graphics cards and do you have any issues? Reason I ask is that having blamed NVIDIA's awful Vista drivers for poor game performance (particularly COD2) with my 2 x 8800GTX cards, I am nnow starting to worry that the other known awful drivers for Xfi sound cards may be partly or all to blame. I have complained that despite 100.64 drivers (haven't tried 100.65 yet) supporting DX9 SLI and my 3D scores only being 100 or so lower, the in game performance in Vista is very poor compared to XP. But having now looked (and listened) to this poor performance I notice that the laggy feel is accompanied by a noticeable sound lag and this is particularly bad when things get hectic and then the game is awful. So I am now wondering if the 3D sound issues with XFi drivers and Vista are causing any or all of this, so can anyone else post their experiences with Xfi and G80's ini Vista and I suppose anyone else playing COD2 with G80's in Vista without an Xfi card? Thanks Ridesy
Well i got a X-Fi Platinum and i get some issues with some games, Supreme Commander only used the 2 front and center speakers unless i changed from 5.1 to 4.1 in the driver settings, stuff like that, only like 1 game out of 10 tough. Thats due to the craptacular beta vista drivers for the xfi, and NO word on when a proper vista driver is due, ppl on the official forums are going berzerk at Creative But i have no preformance issues at all, what so ever.. So thats prolly something else thats wrong for ya. Also note that SLI aint working in vista currently for hte 8800 series.
Ive got same cards m8 i know what your talking about, you notice it especially with the mp44, It is the sound drivers thats causing the problems as i uninstalled my x-fi card and tried using onboard sound which helped and got rid of the laggy sound issue. x-fi drivers should be here soon, hopefully
I have an 8800GTX, and an X-Fi Fatal1ty, and I have the bay installed. I have tried Half Life 2, and Quake 4, and not had the lsightest sign of any issues at all, running at 1920x1200 in both games, with 2x or higher, and vsync. So I dont think that the x-fi and 8800 combo itself causes issues. PS March 8th or 9th is the date set by Creative themselves for the final driver launch for X-fi in Vista
cod2 is the main game i play, i'm also using 100.64 with sli enabled cod2 is unplayable my computer locks going into the menu page forcing me to do a hard restart but if i disable sli in the driver settings and run on 1 card its super smooth in dx7 but it feels very heavy in dx9 although i am getting 70-90fps @1920x1200 i have installed the latest vista driver from creative but i am also using alchemy to enable eax sound in cod2 i don't here any problem with the sound or get any lag i guess we are just in the same boat as everybody else awaiting on that magic driver
I've got Vista, an 8800GTX, and an X-Fi, and have had problems with my system freezing. But, I've traced most of the freezes to Logitech's Setpoint drivers for my MX518 mouse. Has anyone else noticed problems with Logitech's drivers and Vista?
As for now: SLI with Vista is crap!!! Also: x-fi drivers are pretty crap !!! I don't think it's the combination of X-fi and 8800, it's just the lack of decent drivers! I can play games decent on Vista, but it's hell of a lot better in XP. Vista is ATM NOT READY for gaming (unless you want to play anything DX10, like the cascades demo) Just go gaming on XP, man!
lemme guess you have 2 gtx's in sli giving you only the one pci slot in the middle which your x-fi is plugged into right? this is just one of the reasons i am glad to be rid of the asus a8n32sli,i had 2 7800gtx's in sli and my x-fi in that board and it would not stop annoying the piss out of me(was like a 9 month nightmare of everything that annoys me that i finally got away from) ended up trashing it and going back to one of my old boards,first look at a list of your irq's, however you do it in vista, you will notice not only is your x-fi in pci slot #2(only pci slot open with 2 8800 in sli) sharing with your second gtx in pci-e slot #2, but half the board is trying to share with your x-fi and both your gtx's.that board has very poor pci/pci-e irq handling and ive found that high end cards and x-fi's dont seem to like that too much and can have very nasty and annoying problems in games. and if you only use 1 gtx, in order to get the board to make the x-fi and the one gtx NOT share irq is to put the 1 gtx in the bottom black pci-e slot #2, and the x-fi in pci slot #1 so the sound card is above the gtx in th epci slot that would normally be blocked by the card in pci-e slot#1.
Bump as I'm having a moderately related problem at the moment which has seemingly reduced my X-Fi to a brick. I have an Asus P5B-Deluxe (Wifi), which has just one 16x PCI-E slot and then a black one lower down which looks like another 16x slot but according to what I've read is actually 4x. http://images.google.co.uk/images?q=p5b-deluxe As putting the 8800GTX in the blue 16x slot basically knocks out the two PCI slots below it, I can't use them. So the X-Fi is in the very bottom PCI slot. The problem is that Vista is completely unable to detect it. Not as a tentative multimedia audio controller, not as an unknown device -- nothing. It can see absolutely nothing there, despite an Audigy 2 operating in the same slot without issue before (I've formatted since then). I'm really stuck here. Using the other PCI slots isn't an option as the 8800GTX has to be in that PCI-E slot as far as I can tell, so if I can't get the X-Fi working in this slot I'm wrecked. I looked in the BIOS for IRQ settings and stuff but I really don't understand what they mean at all; is there something in particular I can look for?
Probably asking on Creative forums would be better. i have a friend that has the P5B and a x-fi and it works. What i can suggest you is to have the latest motherboard bios and the intel p965 drivers installed. Lastly, your x-fi may be dead. Try it in another computer.
Yeah, good call. I'll try to arrange another system test, although it'll be towards the later end of things to try as my old one was left a carcass after the upgrade. I'll also try the Intel p965 drivers when I get back from work, although I'm not too optimistic they'll help (Do those drivers usually help with stuff like this?). Already flashed my BIOS. Thanks though, those suggestions'll do me for now. I'll ask on the Creative forums later. I don't think I've ever had a soundcard that wasn't a problematic tit to get working at first, whether it be software, drivers or hardware. Possibly by no coincidence all five of them have been Creative cards. ¬¬
Hi again, This is really spooky to see this old post pop back up today, as I have been following this up on Creative and EVGA forums in the past few days! I now have even more issues with this flaming Soundblaster XFi Xtreme Music card, as having just received last week my first Vista only game (Halo2 Vista), I have started to use Vista again for gaming. Up until this point I used only XP for games and had Vista as dual boot for office app's etc, as I use Vista at work and do like it as an OS. Back on post. I now have the latest and greatest NVIDIA 158.45 drivers for my dual 8800GTX's and this works beautifully with Halo 2. But when I then decided to update my Xfi drivers to the end May release latest and supposedly final drivers, all I got on reboot was crackle and hiss, no sound at all. Now before this I had read many posts on varying forums about Vista 64, 4Gb RAM and XFi crackle, but I had stuck with some March release XFi drivers and had never had this issue. However these March drivers gave me no mic input and many features of Xfi in XP were missing, so when I got Halo2 I wanted mic for TS and installed these new drivers, but now am back again on march ones as the latest drivers just don't work for me. I ahve re-read the original posts on thsi thread and whilst the IRQ issue may be for real, I can't see how that would cause crackle with only one set of drivers. So if anyone else has Vista 64, 4Gb RAM one or two 8800GTX and an XFi card, I'd be grateful for any input, as at the moment I am going to rip the card out and revert to the EVGA onboard sound! Ridesy
I've got Vista x64 4 Gb RAM and dual 8800GTXs with an xfi Platinum, I don't have any sound issues at all using the latest released creative drivers. I am having some other problems around image corruption in SLI but nowt wrong with my sound
That's really odd, the latest X-Fi drivers were the first ones that actually gave me the use of my mic.
Vista 8800GTX X-Fi I have the same setup as yourself, and the main problems are not that bad. The issue with the X-FI sound cards and SLI is to do with the motherboard BIOS, it is a well known issue with the 680i using SLI and a X-FI soundcards(all 680i chipsets i think)Get yourself onto the EVGA message boards and you will find it has been an issue from day one . Update your bios to the latest, P28 i think, it solved alot of problems with sound issues. As for the poor performance of 8800's in vista it just boils down to the fact fact that Vista is CACK. I loaded the humam head demo in vista and the performance was awfull, loaded it in XP and it was as smooth as silk. The Drivers will get better with time , but for time being we will have to make do with our expensive DX10 PC's playing DX9 games well Forgot to point out, the issue with 680i & X-FI & 8800 is when SLI is used
slightly off topic: how do un-install creative drivers in vista ?? as its not in the programs features bit??
Well, I'm incredibly embarrassed to discover that the reason I couldn't get the X-Fi to be detected is because it wasn't slotted in properly. To my defense, the card seems to fit significantly less well than any other PCI card I've ever installed. Indeed, I literally pushed as far as I could before the motherboard was clearly going to snap and it still wouldn't go in, while my Audigy 2 slots into the same slot with a very neat 'thunk'. In the end I had to take out my 8800 GTX completely, whose weight seemed to be causing some physical issues with the case and motherboard, making it difficult to put other cards in. The X-Fi then slotted in with the same cleanliness as the Audigy 2. I can only put it down to that behemoth of a graphics card. It really wouldn't surprise me if others have done the same thing, since the card does actually look like it's slotted in and the metal bracket even touches the case and can be screwed in; however, it's actually out by what must be under 1mm, which is seemingly enough. Buh. Works like a dream now, though.
