DosFreak wrote:Onboard audio has always sucked. The only reason NVIDIA got more of a bad rap than other motherboard with onboard sound is because their motherboards are targeted to gamers. Onboard audio still sucks but because it's just sound people don't give a shit.
The thing is, NV's NVAPU in NF2 MCP-T (I think it was) was just as capable as anything prior to X-Fi. They just stopped developing for it after 2004. They gave up on support for it entirely. Part of that is that mobos are supposed to be cheap as hell, and a audio DSP isn't ever going to be as cheap as Realtek trash, so mobo makers didn't want to use it. And so it didn't do the volume, yada yada, and with NF3 they dropped it entirely.
The question may be, just how much volume does Creative move and is it really worth their time to sell sound cards at all anymore? They aren't going to pour millions of $$ into continued support if almost no one uses their hardware. And, of course, the fact that no other companies have interest in trying to develop gaming sound cards, there is no competition and no motivation to be more than the minimum. This is not a mind set that is exclusive to "evil Creative".
There are tangible differences between the Audigy models. And honestly almost all of them are superior to everything else out there for games so, again, they are doing the minimum due to no reason to do more. X-Fi was a major release, is some amazing audio hardware, but I think it still kinda bombed from a sales standpoint. The company is hurting big time, financially. I'm sure they're only around today because of how much they've diversified.