Neowin.net

Exactly what I was going to write mate

Yeah, the experience I had with my X-Fi during the Vista betas made me really mad at Creative. My only problem is that I am addicted to their CMSS-3D technology. What I ended up doing was buying a Creative Xmod. It's basically a USB sound card that has built-in CMSS. But since it's a USB sound card, it just uses drivers that are included with Windows. That means it's future-proof and supports Linux also.

Last edited by Chugworth on 12 Jan 2008 - 18:40

smoking crack again? what problems

Seriously? It took how long for us to get drivers that actually worked? I actually gave up on PC gaming because I was just so fed up with the hassles.

i been running vista since november of 2006, there were issues maybe till around march. tell me what HUGE issues did you have.

Crashing whenever I exited any 3d game, a "Dundun" sounds was made.
BSOD randomly in games.
My favorite Creative driver error, randomly the drivers will just disappear off my computer it takes about 2 months, I restart my computer and poof "Windows is looking for drivers". Gotta love Creative drivers!
Right now I'm using on-board, it doesn't sound anywhere near as nice, but its stable, and I rather have a Stable setup than a expensive unstable but better sounding setup.

Last edited by SierraSonic on 12 Jan 2008 - 22:11

Oh quit the fanboy defensive attitude already, it's getting old. Not everyone has perfect experiences with Vista or any other OS for that matter.

And which other manufacturers create cards that fully support hardware EAX? All others i've ever seen were based on realtek chipsets which nowhere come close.

Or the fact that each time the machine's reset, I loose all of my sound and speaker settings and have to reconfigure it every single time. If I do another 'clean' install of the drivers, I think I'll go insane.

A few now since Creative has been losing money as of late. MSI has a on-board sound chip-set from Creative and one other company has a sound card out that's based off the X-Fi sound cards but it's been beefed up a bit.

Last edited by Synthetic on 13 Jan 2008 - 05:42

Sorry just had to respond here..

Problems?

How about all the dropped hardware features in Vista??

What am I on about..

Ok.. This just from memory....

Popping and clicking randomly.. Fine under XP..

Loss of hardware acceleration in games under Vista - requiring a software hack workaround emulation layer that took creative months to get working..

Loss of a perfectly working and supported 6.1 speaker mode in hardware under Vista... My rear centre speaker has been silent ever since the upgrade to Vista. These are official creative speakers as well.. That really sucked..

Total loss of hardware ability to playback and decoded Hi Def Audio DVD format - again perfectly working and advertised as such under Vista - now totally removed...

Best bit of all - after months of waiting for all these and others to be fixed - they want to charge US for "buying" the new Vista drivers cd..

Xi-fi was a premium product released at the tail end of XP's lifecycle - it felt very botched once Vista was upon us..

Creative or MS's fault for removing support from the OS? Doesn't really matter - Vista was massively delayed and they both had months to work all this out.. Creative's story is things got moved at the last moment in Vista - the goalposts got up and moved... I reckon its more like 50/50...


Personally, since owning almost every single card Creative put out since 1993 - I promised myself I wouldnt' touch any of their products with a bargepole ever again - they just lost one loyal customer over all this ugly episode with Vista....

Creative - get your act together!!

Last edited by Mr Plant on 13 Jan 2008 - 14:49

Vista driver problems, Linux driver problems. How many people have worthwhile audio equipment for their PC anyway? I don't.

With decent audio being available onboard most motherboards that support 7.1 analog out and digital outs, I'm surprised that the sound card market hasn't shriveled up.

I've got an Auzentech card and I love it. Never had any of the problems I experienced with Creative cards (missing features, reinstalling drivers over and over again, poorly labelled driver versions and update numbers).

they did have problems before vista launch, its been running perfectly since february or march. never had a single crash or BSOD becuase of creative.

So its sounds like you already have one of these. So you must be one of the engineers right? One of the company owners or founders? At least some kind of insider, right? Damn, I was kind of excited about this too.

Last edited by solardog on 12 Jan 2008 - 23:05

I do own a PCI X-Fi XtremeMusic and it is exactly as I said. And so was the SB Live! I had before that. I find myself rarely using the X-Fi after moving to Vista. Newer games don't seem to benefit from it really so I just use my Echo AudioFire4 most of the time. In general the audio quality on that is far superior but then again it's not a fair comparison considering the Echo is aimed more towards music production and is a lot more expensive. In any case Creative could take a note from Echo Audio on how to do drivers: totally stable, only a few MB in size and with an intuitive, easy to use single control panel. Creative couldn't design a good user interface for their stuff even with a gun against their heads.

They've dropped support for plenty of products in the past. Oh and Audigy users have to PAY to get the working features in Vista? Yeah, if that isn't saying "screw you" to their paying customers I don't know what is. Sorry but this company sucks.

My question exactly.

I am in the market for a new sound card, but I refuse to deal with the support from Creative.

The Auzen X-Fi Prelude, its based on the same chipset as the creative line of cards and uses modified creative drivers however it works perfect in vista and has support for dolby digital encoding. There is still work been done on the drivers to add DTS encoding and they will be releasing linux drivers too. Supports all the fancy stuff for games which the non creative sound cards tend to lack.

Somehow I doubt this will be a good alternative if you despise Creative's driver support...
Unless they manage to roll out their very own vista drivers within the next few months.

Exactly.

I remember the nightmare I had with my original X-Fi and my nForce4 chipset. I had to get an entirely new revision of the card. Then there was the whole Vista migration issue. It took them AGES to get drivers out, and they sucked for the longest time. Basically, I'm done with Creative products. The hardware is superb, but the driver support and customer care are horrible. HORRIBLE.

Last edited by ataris_kid on 13 Jan 2008 - 07:43

Actually they've damn near always had a rep for screwy drivers and subpar support. What is sticking it to them is onboard audio becoming decent (think Azalia with daughter boards) and multi-core CPU's that don't need hardware DSP to offload processing. EAX is overhyped so there is not much reason to buy Creative cards when there are others with better audio quality output. They are suffering the consequences of their own monopoly in "gaming" audio hardware. We should have been experiencing wave tracing by now, perhaps A3D 4 or 5 would have provided it.

The reason I got my X-Fi is because the Crystalizer helps out a decent amount. If non-Creative onboard solutions offered a similar thing, I wouldn't think twice about chucking this damn thing.

The Prelude comes with Alchemy so it works the same as any of the creative x-fi cards

The X-Fi supports EAX 5 (the Audigy series, specifically the Audigy 2 and above, stop at EAX 4); however, unless you have EAX-to-OpenAL mapper software (ALchemy) that will work in Vista, you will, at best, have EAX Environmental Audio support in Vista using the current drivers for either (that is entirely due to changes in the audio stack in Vista). Is there a version of ALchemy for the Audigy series? Yes ($10 download from Creative). Does it, in fact, work? Also, yes (I have ALchemy for Audigy myself, and I do use it without problems). Do the Audigy series Vista drivers support what features the audio stack allows? Also, yes; this includes OpenAL support (OpenAL predates the X-Fi, and is supported by *every* Audigy that uses the current drivers, from the last version of the ZS to the original Audigy; by the way, OpenAL in Vista is unaffected by the audio stack changes, which is why it Just Works).

Notice I'm not pimping the X-Fi (I don't own one). I have an Audigy 2 ZS and Vista Ultimate (with the SP1RC installed) which is working just fine. The EAX issue, in fact, only affects games that were *designed for Windows XP* that use/require EAX (as I have pointed out, games that support OpenAL aren't affected, and you don't need an X-Fi for OpenAL support). One of my favorite games under Vista was, in fact, designed for XP (C&C Generals: Zero Hour) which supports EAX 4 (ALchemy remaps the calls to allow ZH to work normally); however, my newest game (Universe at War: Earth Assault) supports OpenAL (as do Bioshock and C&C3: Tiberium Wars and COD4 and Crysis; I own all *except* COD4).

So what is the *real* issue? Sounds like it's *still* that things in Vista don't work like they did in XP. (Therefore, it seems like folks *still* don't like the idea of making trade-offs when it comes to a new OS.)

That is going to be my next sound card, or when I go to Vista (5 year old pc does not like vista too well) it will have this sound card.

I knew Creative would make a "new" sound card that support Vista natively instead of updating the drivers for X-Fi on Vista more then there forced to.