Creative Labs SoundBlaster X-Fi 2 discussion thread

But to be honest, those engines sound rather crappy and i doubt they support 128 voices either.
EAX 2.0 is nothing special indeed but latest games with EAX 4.0 HD sound so brutal awesome on X-Fi i'm like drool drool omg omg. Doom 3, Quake 4 and FEAR are just few examples, i also couldn't imagine CoD 1 and 2 without EAX 3.0 and 4.0. Or even old Half-Life 1. With or without EAX it was like you played a different game.
I kinda hate Creative sometimes because of their lame driver policy (sloooow, but on the other hand i had almost zero problems with my X-Fi) but damn i love the EAX effects over anything else.

 

Yeah Creative makes good products and as Rob said in Vista one have to use OpenAl couse Directsound dont work!

I agree that the are doing a crappy job with thier drivers :S

But man do X-fi sounds good in Prey with my HS-900 headphones and CMSS3D its totaly out of this world

EAX HD makes games totaly come alive so my hat of to Creative for that atleased!

 

I have been playing Prey, sound very good with my Prelude and HD595's!
To note, Prey is a OpenAL game. Great sound effects.

 

You should try Doom 3: Ressurection of Evil with enabled EAX.
First few levels through dig site are so damn creepy and realistic sounding i almost **** myself here and there. I've tried it with Pioneer headphones but i'm sure it would sound just as awesome on MX5021...

 

Is there honestly anything creative could add to an X-FI? I mean the current chip is probably powerful enough, the only thing they could do i'd think is to just add higher quality parts to make the sound better. That or adding 32bit support which wouldn't be a selling point for me to upgrade.

 

Um, what 32bit support? It works on 32bit and 64bit systems...

 

I believe he is referring to 32bit playback. Since it's currently 24bit.

 

Interesting. As far as I know EAX1/2 added reverb effects. At roughly the same time Aureal already had A3D 1 and 2 doing Distance/occlusion and even making sounds sound according to the objects they penetrate through like wood glass ect. A3D 3 was suppose to add reverb effect to have everything and more that EAX had at that same time.

Creative then sued Aureal over silly things. Unfortunately Aureal did not have the same money and went bankrupt. Creative then bought the patents/intellectual property that was left of Aureal and created....

you guessed it EAX HD in version 3/4/5 using those same technologies.

Now A3D was amazing, and still is actually. This is what makes EAX HD that amazing. The stupid reverb effects really are not that great, but the technology from A3D is definitely one of the things that do make the latest versions of EAX so amazing.

Obviously I can not prove all of this but chances are I am pretty close.

All in all not bad, I think though we can thank them for now adding all of this to OpenAL and giving other users without creative cards access to the same technologies. This is at a price that it will handle a lot less channels but you get a good idea of what it can do and it might give users with money or serious gamers the incentive to consider the high end cards.

Out of interest sake, a Vortex 2 card from 1996 could do 96 channels, the X-Fi is now at 128. All that extra power the chip has...I hope it goes into all the new features in EAX 5 and so on, it is in fact 12 years later technology should be improving quite a bit.

 

In fact geometric occlusions and reflections are used ever since EAX 3.0... Versions 4 and 5 just upgrade all that including lots of cinematic features.

Also you have to take into account Aureal wasn't doing any reverberation, just pure 3D positioning with geometric effects, no environmental effects. Even though Vortex was awesome those 96 can't be directly compared to 128 on X-Fi...

 

True, though Aureal did actually do Reverbs in A3D 3 including EAX 1 in their latest beta drivers for the Vortex 2 SQ3500, very few of those actually made it out to the public but they have started on it before they went down.

As for not comparing the channels directly, you can actually since that is what the drivers report as being usable.

Not that it matter really, I think the X-Fi has 128 channels and put the power it has into something else or has so much more features that it probably needs it for everything new it does.

 

FEAR is a good comparison for EAX 2.0 vs later EAX technologies.

I played it for a while with just 2.0, then I turned on the EAX Advanced HD option and it was so much better.

As for EAX being dead, I wouldn't be too sure about that. The only thing software devs need to do is have EAX calls go thru their sound API. Under XP, that was built into the OS. With Vista, you can still do hardware sound, but it's custom with each specific game. I think Bioshock is a good example. I sure it uses OpenAL. When it detects EAX soundcards, it gives tells Vista to give hardware control over to it.

From OpenAL website: "The OpenAL API will provide a direct path to any native OpenAL driver for delivering premium quality interactive 3D audio for gaming on Windows Vista. Since Windows Vista does not inherit the hardware abstraction layer for audio that was present under previous versions of Windows, including Windows XP, there will be no more hardware acceleration of DirectSound™ 3D. For this reason, OpenAL becomes very important as a solution for game developers wanting to take advantage of audio hardware. Overall, this will be a positive development for both OpenAL and for the PC gaming industry. It allows developers to choose an open audio API to write to, and lets hardware companies like Creative Labs® have a direct path to its hardware, with the ability to add in new features at will."

That's what Alchemy does. It just gives a way for the soundcard to get the EAX calls because directsound (or whatever the hell it's called isn't in Vista).

 

Problem is A3D 3.0 never got publically used because Aureal went bonkers before this could happen. After that all developers ceased A3D support anyway.
You need game to support A3D 3.0. The very latest game to support A3D 2.0 was GTA3. Too bad A3D 2.0 it doesn't work anymore under Vista on X-Fi

 

i have vortex2 card(unused now) and x-fi

and

eax, no matter version, suck compared to a3d 2.0

that was best 3d positioning software and hardware i ever heard

creative should bancrupt, that lazy morons

 

seems creative is finaly listening to its customers.
in begin off june new driver for vista.
they will bring back full functionality basicly.
also fix lot 4 gb issues

 

Or they were forced into it under legal matters, behind the scenes...