Gaming Soundcard?

My personal experience was one of lack of support for the Audigy 2/Audigy 4 when Vista came out. Actually the intentional crippling of the card by Creative in order to sell the X-Fi. It goes back further than that for me actually, I had their AWE ISA/Soundblaster cards as well. They have a habit of reducing the ability of their hardware through the available software they offer. I know what the ability of the hardware is and was certainly impressed by it but when they decide to shut the door on something that is still perfectly capable for no other reason than to sell product it hurts.

I have no personal experience with the X-Fi and don't think I ever will. Three of the five family PC's I now have run onboard sound. It is hard to justify the purchase of a sound card from Creative when the support for the onboard sound is always there and the quality keeps getting better in that area. Especially when Creative's planned obsolescence stares you in the face.

Are you familiar with the epic saga of Daniel_K and Goliath (Creative)? Ugly story but one worth knowing.

I actually pulled the Audigy 4 I own from an old P4 rig to try it in the one in my sig yesterday and due to Daniel_K's efforts I can say that Creative was shamed into actually releasing a half decent set of drivers, although severely reduced in their features, for this card and Vista 64 bit. All the features are still there actually, as was proved by Daniel, Creative just chose to disable them in order to push product. He also was able to resolve a plethora of issues with the X-Fi drivers when Vista came out which Creative did not want to be bothered with spending the time on actually. Right now he has drivers available for the X-Fi which resolve issues which Creative would probably like to see another card move off the shelf over.

OMG I wrote a rant! Sorry.....

 

The whole daniel thing is so overblown and overhyped it's almost painful to watch and read.
And his miraculous drivers. Heh, i wonder what he can do so much better than Creative Labs itself lol. Never had problems with it and i just love it. Drivers are good and problem free and i'm running 64bit OS with 6GB of RAM (specs where problems should be constant thing according to users screaminga round). ALchemy does wonders to older games in Vista. And sound is just great for games, music and movies. One of the best purchases i've done in years (X-Fi Xtreme Music that is). So for gaming, i'd pick X-Fi anytime. Xtreme Gamer cards are available for 55 eur here in Slovenia, which is dirty cheap for such soundcard.

 

How do you overhype Creative's admission that they choose to kill support for their product to sell a part with the same features???

 

And what product would that be exactly?

 

The entire Audigy line, several X-fi's having reduced features in Vista that existed on XP (That Daniel_K proved were intentionally disabled).

I gave up due to a lack of a solution to the SCP issue thats plagued them for close to a decade now. Throw in Creatives history of quickly killing off products, I see no reason whatsoever to stick with them.

X-fi's an overrated tech anyway. Everyone has something which does the same effects now, and I haven't seen many games with a X-fi option for a while now...

 

Auzentech uses Creative drivers for their XF-I cards and Usually Cmedia Drivers for some of their cards. If i recall.

I know for a fact Asus uses Cmedia drivers for the Xonar cards.

I'm thinking about the same question as the OP and i'm leaning to the Xonar or maybe the Titanium.

 

Because sady auzentech still have to wait til creative make the drivers for them, as creative doesnt want auzentech hands on the code. Prolly scared that auzentech would make them shine.

I really think auzentech shouldnt had even signed up with creative on this deal, since they not even alloud to even mess with X-FI code as creative isnt gonna let them get ahold of it.

It be something diffent if creative let them.

 

+1

I only had one problem with my X-fi Gamer, and it was a crackling sound which I fixed by switching out the cabels.

I see 10000's of people flaming Creative, but never see any real arguments to why they suck so much.

PEBKAC !

 

They were called out on it and have since stopped as far as I know but, well here ya go.

And:

From: http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2008/04/daniel_k-who-fi.html

 

I've had some problems before with my Audigy 2 ZS card in Win XP. I run XP Pro 64 bit so I can have 4 GB or ram, a memory issue in the creative drivers caused the audio card to not assign any memory for it, so ALL the hardware features (only reason to buy the damn thing) were unavailable to me. And with no fix that I can find, even after contacting creative, except "Use less RAM" I decided to give the card to my dad.

I've been looking into the ASUS Xonar DX card, it seems good. All the features that I would need. Does anyone else have experience with that card?

 

I dont have experience with the lower end xonar DX, just the higher end HDAV13, but it should make you happy.

IT does emulate EAX3-5 with the use of DSGX2.0 i dont know if it has DSGX2.5 like the rest of the higher Xonars cards.

 

The funny thing is if NVIDIA pulled off half the stuff Creative has, everyone would be demanding that they were driven out of business.