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fourier
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A week or two ago I saw an article on the Asus Xonar D2/D2X and how it supports EAX 5.0. Creative has basically refused licensing to other audio card makers to be able to maintain a hold on the gaming market. Excellent audio cards exist, but often lack support in games for multichannel since EAX is basically the only route (although some extra work could be done by the devs to use openal to properly utilize the audio hardware). Personally, I can't stand Creative. If I want to play quake in win2k with my audigy 2 zs, there is no way I can use the official creative drivers due to crashing every couple minutes. If I use kx drivers, then the frequency is greatly reduced but still will crash occasionally. They have near zero customer support with answers such as "buy our new card". Even if the Xonar doesn't perform as well as far as CPU utilization, I would still make it my choice -- there is no way I will ever buy another creative product again. Creative, of course, is attempting to slander the Xonar after news of its support for EAX 5.0. http://forums.vr-zone.com/showthread.php?t=255152 |
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Phoenix
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I've had problems with Creative products. Here's a few personal experiences:
SB 128 cards (purchased at a substantial discount) having faulty midi synth chips. Ever hear a midi synth go out of tune? Neither had I until using one of these. No wonder they went off the market so quickly and quietly.
8x CD-Rom (when this was a fast speed) that kept crashing Privateer 2 with a disk read error during cinematics. Described by customer support as a "design flaw" that they would not cover under warranty. If only birds could sue.... Strike 1.
$100 SB Live! sound card. Supposedly the best thing on the market at the time, right? I needed a sound card and WTF else was there to buy except the defective SB 128 cards floating around in the bargain bin? Drivers and background software ate so much system resources it caused hitching in my games. Midi synth table sounded horrible, and swapping sound fonts (nice idea Creative, too bad they all sound like crap) did not help. Shortly after, I got a listen to one of Guillemot's Maxi Sound Fortissimo cards - priced at half the price of the Creative card. I fell in love with the midi chipset, which is Yamaha's XG-GS. I consider it one of the best all-around midi sets, especially for Doom. It also did A3D which was trying to make it on the scene at the time, though EAX support was lacking of course because of it being a Creative proprietary thing. The drivers were low memory footprint, and I did not have any in-game lag that I had with Creative's bloatware. Now if a $50 card outperforms the $100 card what does that tell you? It's a shame Guillemot's product line is dead, but Creative pretty much bullied everyone else out of the market. I really wish this card had been present before I wasted money on the memory gluttonous SB Live! card. I had already been unhappy with Creative, and this was Strike 2.
Yamaha also has a software synthesizer that is excellent that came with my Fortissimo 3 since it used a different hardware wave table. I had used the software synth in 98 and 200 without problems, but it does not work in XP. I've tried several times to get it working, apparently so have others on the net with the same results, and it's no longer supported by Yamaha (shame!). Undaunted, I installed my original Fortissimo card in this system. I use it strictly as a midi synth since the 2000/XP drivers for digital audio are a bit buggy and flip the channels once in a while, but the midi plays flawlessly. Through the miracle of analog cabling, I have the midi output looped back into the system so I can hear the music I like in Doom and other midi-based games like Heretic, etc. Take THAT, Creative!
Second-hand knowledge: Two people I know have had 52x Creative CD-Rom drives die within a year of purchase. That's not counting other gripes I've heard about Creative that I've since forgotten. That's Strike 3, and you're out, Creative. I will never buy anything from you again, and I will encourage flocks of grackles to empty their cloacae on your executives' vehicles at every opportunity. May thy vehicles be stained purple, and may the acidic droppings rust thy chassis!
If Asus can 1-up Creative I'm all for it. Asus makes some quality stuff and I've been pretty impressed with their motherboards to date. I'm using onboard audio right now, but I'll be keeping an eye on this one.
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  I fly into the night, on wings of fire burning bright...
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Lopson
Elite
Posts: 1133
Still Going In Circles
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I've known about this card's existance for a while. It's a huge hit down here! All of the magazines review it as "the best out there". An interesting turn of events, IMO. Hopefully, Asus will expand their line-up of soundcards. The Xonar is far too expensive for most consumers, and it wouldn't hurt to cut off some of the "fat" to get a low-budget card.
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fourier
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I've known about this card's existance for a while. It's a huge hit down here! All of the magazines review it as "the best out there". An interesting turn of events, IMO. Hopefully, Asus will expand their line-up of soundcards. The Xonar is far too expensive for most consumers, and it wouldn't hurt to cut off some of the "fat" to get a low-budget card.
My fault, I meant to say the DX. Check it out: http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=11172Also, how does creative respond to people in the community making better drivers for vista that actually allows the people who use vista to get their creative cards working in it? http://forums.creative.com/creativelabs/...ard.id=soundblaster&thread.id=116332 |
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Kain-Xavier
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While we're on the Creative hate-train, I thought I'd throw in my two cents... The Sound Blaster Audigy is technically capable of handling EAX 4.0 but was limited to EAX 3.0 through official drivers. Oddly enough, EAX 4.0 was released around the same time as the Audigy 2. Also according to Wikipedia, the Sound Blaster Audigy was falsely marketed as a 24-bit audio card and had issues with digital audio output. On a semi-related note... Does anybody have any experience with Turtle Beach cards? How do they compare to Asus and Creative cards? |
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« Last Edit: 2008-03-30, 12:56 by Kain-Xavier »
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Phoenix
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I haven't kept up with Turtle Beach recently, but they've been aimed more at the music production side in the past. There are a lot of composers (think Robert Prince, etc) that use midi keyboards to compose their music and then record it into software on the PC using the midi interface on the sound card in order to do editing. Back when midi wavetable was the "thing" for sound cards, Roland and Turtle Beach were the high-end professional-grade cards, and Creative's AWE-32 was the low end "consumer" card. There's still a few computer sound cards on the market geared primarily toward music production, and they're quite expensive. Since CPU's have increased in speed and hard drives and data throughput have also increased exponentially in capacity, midi has fallen by the wayside for games, which now rely on raw music tracks in the form of .mp3 or .ogg. Sound cards aimed at gamers are now focused more on hardware acceleration, multichannel output, and environmental effects.
You can check out Turtle Beach's cards at http://www.turtlebeach.com They have some external USB cards which are mainly for laptops, and two models for the PC, one at $30, and the other at $60. The $60 version has no joystick port. As for how they'd stack up against Creative or Asus, I think the $60 is limited to EAX 1 and 2, with Directsound and A3D support. I would imagine their customer support is better than Creative's, but I doubt their cards are going to outperform the Xonar.
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I fly into the night, on wings of fire burning bright...
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Lopson
Elite
Posts: 1133
Still Going In Circles
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Apparently, this situation got a lot worse with daniel_k being asked to remove his Vista drivers. I didn't even know there were working drivers for Vista, and to see the only ones that actually supported the new version of Windows being removed is a major blowback for the customers. True, what he was doing was pretty much illegal, but they could have just ignored him and let him continue to do the work they tehmselves refuse to do.
Fat pigs will always want more, and that's the honest truth. Just release a proper Vista package, Creative, it's such a simple solution.
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Thomas Mink
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I'm probably the only one I know (both in the real world and the internet world) who never had a problem with a Creative soundcard. Heck, up until about 3 months ago I was still using the old SB Live! card.. the original one, with the sexy gold plating. Why I decided not to carry it over onto my latest PC upgrade.. I have no idea. The card worked perfectly for almost 10 years, in multiple PC upgrades. But eh.. the on board sound works well enough. Maybe I'll toss it back in there one of these days just for giggles.
(Granted, this is the only Creative card I've ever had.. but it still seems to bring about disbelief amongst the internet populace for some reason or another *shrug*)
However, I will agree with the whole Vista issue.
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Thomas Mink
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When you see this:
O'Shaughnessy also wrote that whether or not it cripples its Vista drivers is a "business decision that only we have the right to make."
It really makes you wonder. I take that as an admittance to purposely crippling their drivers and trying to defend that choice. I'm quite sure that process won't go over well with educated consumers. Also makes you wonder what else they may or may not have crippled over the years.
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