I would not go that far, for most cases the Yamaha Drivers are better, the midi sounds nicer (Default wave table midi on Yamaha is extremely loud and Yamaha XG is clearly superior in sound) and in Win98/DOS they are required to even have audio. But specifically for the use case of wanting the FM Module as a midi device the stock XP driver is the way to go.

Okay. I guess I've just had some bad luck with Yamaha drivers then. I'm looking forward to giving this card a try and if it works in MS-DOS on my modernish PC, I'm definitely going to keep it in there. All I need now is a USB floppy drive 😎