Long story short: Creative started to lose market to integrated motherboard codecs because their drivers sucked. Then Vista came and killed support for hardware audio acceleration. At the same time, Asus and others came and launched sound cards with "dumb" codecs but better DACs and OPAMPs and more stable drivers.
Eventually, hardware audio acceleration became negligible for the consumers' eyes.
In fact, gaming audio in the PC itself went backwards. Back in the earlier 2000s, we used to see great quality 5.1/7.1 speakers sets for the PC
with great value for its price in the shelves. Nowadays, all we see is either 2.0/2.1 sets and
this crap.
Regardless, with HDMI audio becoming standard, HTIBs make more sense than surround speakers for the PC.
What are those hardware acceleration features you mention? I thought Vista only had killed the native MIDI support and by that I mean that they just kept the Roland based Microsoft GS Wavetable SW Synth in every single OS (even on 8.1) but after Vista you cannot change the default MIDI device in the Control Panel anymore.
I think they kept all the hardware acceleration features, afaik.
They're just looking to make products that people might buy since I imagine their main PC market is dieing and they're trying to stay alive.
Well, aside from accessories and external speakers, the typical soundcard hardware is rarely seen compared to what it was in the past, when every single PC had a soundcard.
Even when people try to share their findings on powerful PC rigs which can run games at excellent prices, they never mention the audio, it seems, which saves a few bucks, at the cost of having a generic like Conexant Smartaudio solution, which is so bad but gets the job done.
Before soundfonts were also hot and only worked with the not really well implemented Creative drivers, but now you can run them on software now, with better solutions than Creative ever shared.
Gotta admit I don't care that much for software audio -I still use it sometimes, it's useful- and bought myself a Roland General MIDI 2/GS compatible MIDI (plus it has 650 native melodic presets) device for my PC, to compose music, plus I can use it somehow as a 2nd soundcard, though it's not really its purpose.
But a Creative soundcard would do nothing to improve the audio of my laptop, for obvious reasons. Too bad 'cos they have a few legendary soundcards, one of my first ones, the SoundBlaster Live!, which I still keep at home.