Interesting.

I've never used the optical output, but otherwise the PCIe X-Fi has worked well for me.

The PCI X-Fi cards, you often read about them having issues. Because I hardly use them, I haven't got any practical experiences. Might also depends on chipset and PCI implementation, but that's just a guess.

But like you say, EAX 5, I believe BF 2142 and Bioshock use it.

I do believe that CMSS-3D is better on the X-Fi cards. That's surround sound over headphones. A ton of EAX sound amazing with this.

But if you have a 5.1 setup, then I doubt it makes a lot of difference.

Interesting indeed. I read somewhere at some point that actually early PCIe sound cards were finicky compared to contemporary PCI cards.

My impression was that the Audigy is better to use under XP, and X-Fi (true X-Fi, not the XtremeAudio fake thing) are better under Vista/Win7, because Creative tends to target specific OSes with its drivers for specific cards, and other combinations get reduced features and poor support.

Quality-wise, I noticed no differences between the Audigy 2 ZS on my XP ring and the X-Fi XtremeGamer on my Vista rig.

Interesting.

The X-Fi was pretty much THE Windows XP card to have.

When Vista came out, the Titanium HD and Recon 3D cards came out. That was a sad time with hardware accelerated audio / EAX basically being dad in Vista 😒

Still annoyed why the Titanium HD is not supported in XP. It's a really good card. I do all the my captures with it.

With the PCI isses, there are quite a few USB solutions. I've got one USB sound card, but it doesn't do EAX in Windows XP for some reason. Modern Windows with ALchemy works fine though.

philscomputerlab wrote:

I do believe that CMSS-3D is better on the X-Fi cards. That's surround sound over headphones. A ton of EAX sound amazing with this.

The Audigy cards were actually the first with the CMSS Headphone function with the HRTF / binaural mixing. I haven't really noticed a difference between what X-Fi and Audigy do for headphones. Maybe X-Fi does do more but I'm not sure what that might be...

philscomputerlab wrote:

The X-Fi was pretty much THE Windows XP card to have.

According to the advertising. 😉 They do make nice slides and cool control panels at Creative.

dr_st wrote:

My impression was that the Audigy is better to use under XP, and X-Fi (true X-Fi, not the XtremeAudio fake thing) are better under Vista/Win7, because Creative tends to target specific OSes with its drivers for specific cards, and other combinations get reduced features and poor support.

Audigy had terrible Vista/7 drivers for a long time. That Daniel_K fellow managed to motivate Creative to improve their drivers considerably. Creative also released a new Audigy 5 / RX card using the old Audigy 4 chip and so that needs new drivers anyway. These cards work fine on even Windows 8 now.

Ah, yeah. Refreshing my memory a bit here.

The first X-Fi PCI variants came out in 2005, before Vista. So I must be wrong about their support being incomplete in XP. I do recall lots of complaints about the other direction (Audigy 2 support for OSes newer than XP). I think Creative eventually got that up to speed, as swaaye's comment explains. Is the Vista/7 suite as complete as the XP one when it comes to controls and features now?

And can a USB-based solution really be more reliable than the PCI/PCIe bus it ultimately connects to?

dr_st wrote:

Is the Vista/7 suite as complete as the XP one when it comes to controls and features now?

And can a USB-based solution really be more reliable than the PCI/PCIe bus it ultimately connects to?

If you download Daniel_K's "Audigy Support Pack", you get all of the Audigy control panels. Everything works. Creative's own download site isn't quite as thorough. It's the same story with X-Fi though.

USB audio can work ok but it will hit the CPU much harder than a PCI/PCIe card. The USB products may not have a full 3D feature set (or it may be entirely CPU processed). This probably doesn't matter with multicore CPUs.

Yes, I much prefer CMSS-3D on the X-Fi. Like you said, the Audigy introduced it, the X-Fi refined it). I don't thing the Audigy supports MacroFX and Elevation filter if you want specific tech details.

Yes, USB sound cards are great. Latency could be an issue, but in a game I doubt it. It's just something to consider, especially if you're gaming on notebooks or have no slots left.

There is also software X-Fi, but the latest X-Fi MB3 is for modern OS. It adds the Creative features to your onboard sound card. Works very well, and since Vista, it's all in software anyway 😀

I've reviewed X-Fi MB3 on my Channel. It's $30 and gives you features of the Sound Blaster Z. For gaming it's great as it gives you SBX-Surround for surround over headphones.

My cousin was a big fan of the Audigy2zs and never encountered any major issues with it. He eventually upgraded to the X-FI Fatal1ty and immediately ran into issues involving major pops and speaker noise, and compatibilities running with SLI, so he gave it away to his friend.

Spec-wise the X-FI should have a nicer processor than the Audigy2, able to work with 128 DS3D/OpenAL audio streams vs the Audigy's 64, and support for EAX5 along with higher s/n ratios.
The new SB-Z series use the same quartet DSP but have the mips core removed, so the X-FI is better suited for offloading CPU usage as shown by the many benchmarks.
If it wasn't plagued by so many software problems and the few speaker hiss issues in the earlier versions hardware design, it would be a really nice card all in all.
Just lacking quality first party driver support.

drivers...always the bane of any hardware's lifespan. The new Audigy's are proof that there was no reason to phase out that older chip, and all they really need is that software support (of course they adapted it over to PCI-e with a bridge chip). I dislike however that they are now over reliant on SBX (a rebranded THX TruStudio) post processing 3D effects. The best SBX can do is blend HRTF between 7.1 audio channels in software. It also lacks all hardware acceleration for DS3D (no xp drivers also), EAX and OpenAL.

>_< on what's become acceptable now a day.

A3D for life, I'm with you.

When Microsoft scrapped hardware accelerated audio, they had to do something. So now we have all this software processing. I'm hoping that one day MS goes back to hardware audio and we can pick up where Aureal was over 10 years ago!

Microsoft was never really the problem (only an excuse) for removing the DS3D HAL. There are alternatives to obtain hardware 3D yet they don't utilize them.

philscomputerlab wrote:

There is also software X-Fi, but the latest X-Fi MB3 is for modern OS. It adds the Creative features to your onboard sound card. Works very well, and since Vista, it's all in software anyway 😀

I've reviewed X-Fi MB3 on my Channel. It's $30 and gives you features of the Sound Blaster Z. For gaming it's great as it gives you SBX-Surround for surround over headphones.

I have MB3 as well. I bought it for my notebook. People complain about the Alchemy support though. I haven't really used it enough to say how well it works.

Alchemy does use hardware processing if it is available. Otherwise it loads a Creative Software 3D library. FEAR doesn't work very well with X-Fi Alchemy of any sort IME. Some of the effects like occlusion don't seem to be working correctly.

ZanQuance wrote:

Microsoft was never really the problem (only an excuse) for removing the DS3D HAL. There are alternatives to obtain hardware 3D yet they don't utilize them.

I don't know enough about this, but I know Creative, if they had any chance of doing some propriety / "this only works with our cars" they would have gone for it. I do believe that MS didn't want anyone to access hardware directly any more in order to improve stability, have less support issues?

They did do ALchemy however, so that's good of them. It has worked very well for me.

You also see more and more games doing their own sound engines. They all sound different, your ears and brain can't get used to them. With EAX under XP, your ears and brain was tuned. That was great for online gaming.

The problem with hardware audio is it was quirky and not everyone cared to pay for it so it was niche. Mess with enough Aureal, Creative, Philips, Turtle Beach, Cmedia, ESS, etc PCI 3D audio cards in Windows 98 and Windows XP, and you might notice common problems among them. Stability, bus issues, interoperability quirks between hardware/drivers for the APIs, etc.

Personally I think CPU processed 3D audio is the way to go instead of going back to the old 3D API wars with flaky hardware on a quirky bus that also has an evil 3D card trying to eat all bus time. 😁

Also I suppose you guys weren't excited by AMD Truaudio enough to remember it? Not that it really did anything terribly exciting in any game. It's still out there though even if no company touches it. I wonder if those Tensilica DSPs could process A3D algoritms and how fast Creative would cease-and-desist that. 😉

Ok, maybe we need a truly kick-ass sound engine / API that game developers can use. I hear what you say about the hardware, but in the end of they day, I feel like we are going backwards with gaming audio. Graphics keep getting better, but sound is often neglected. Oh well.

I went from ESS 688 -> SW20-PC -> WaveForce 192XG -> Live! -> X-Fi PCI -> Auzentech X-Fi Forte PCIe and I never looked back tbh... huge fan of crystalizer too 😁

swaaye wrote:

The problem with hardware audio is it was quirky and not everyone cared to pay for it so it was niche. Mess with enough Aureal, Creative, Philips, Turtle Beach, Cmedia, ESS, etc PCI 3D audio cards in Windows 98 and Windows XP, and you might notice common problems among them. Stability, bus issues, interoperability quirks between hardware/drivers for the APIs, etc.

Personally I think CPU processed 3D audio is the way to go instead of going back to the old 3D API wars with flaky hardware on a quirky bus. 😁

Also I suppose you guys weren't excited by AMD Truaudio enough to remember it? Not that it really did anything terribly exciting in any game. It's still out there though even if no company touches it.

Jerry Mahabub of GenAudio is selling snakeoil with the AstoundSound's BRTF. BRTF is only a measurement of your Interaural Time Difference (IDT) from when an audio signal arrives between ears. Which is already well understood and implemented. The AMD implementation of hardware offloading is nice though.

The issues we all faced back then were caused by Microsoft's horrible WDM driver model and immature DirectX. DS3D support peaked at 8.1 where as all audio API's were coded with DX6 in mind. There were only ever 3 hardware audio API's present, Sensaura, EAX and A3D. None of which were any less stable than the other, Sensaura being the most mature out of all (Its middleware is the reason so many game consoles had 3D audio). EAX as you all know sat on top of DS3D, and A3D while using DS3D buffers if present, was its own entire sound engine and still works even under Vista and 7.

Run these A3D demos under any new OS. You get basic 3D, occlusions, doppler and volumetric sounds on any soundcard and this API was written over 15 years ago. (hrtf was done in the Vortex2 which is why it's lacking)
Nothing wrong with the API at all 😁

ZanQuance wrote:

There were only ever 3 hardware audio API's present, Sensaura, EAX and A3D.

There's also QSound with the VLSI Thunderbird 128/Avenger. 😀

Sensaura was certainly very popular indeed.

I do like A3D a lot. The Aureal drivers are a bit buggy though. Especially that 2048 release that most people seem to think is best.