Soundcards an outdated concept?

[Davros]

What does Aureal got to do with anything I said. S.

Many people dislike creative for killing aureal i guess the poster was assuming that was your reason too

me personally, yes i do dislike them for killing aureal, the distain they sometimes show their customers and various other things - but i absolutely love their soundcards

 

[swaaye]

Don't get me wrong, I don't have some vendetta that you guys are insinuating. I like the Audigy 2 ZS over the integrated chips, and it was pretty kickass on my A7N8X way back when. I knew about the nForce 4 issues (only after I bought it, the mobo I mean), but now I'm getting problems even with the 590 SLI board that I have, and it's just annoying (bad card?).

I'm pretty close to junking the card in favour of the functioning but inferior integrated sound chip (I meant that the hissing wasn't as bad as the other problems I've been getting). I didn't mean to sound (aw haw haw! ) like I was blaming CL for everything.

What does Aureal got to do with anything I said. Stop putting words into my mouth, please. I was frustrated that the integrated chips were functional whereas my ZS was giving me hell. (I should have made it clear. Plus I was searching all morning for nf590 sli solutions to no avail. )

I'm more optimistic that things will be a lot smoother once they switch to PCI-E.

Yah, maybe I went a bit overboard lol. Must be from all that Voodoo Extreme forum reading (yikes).

I'm just always peeved a bit when people jump all over the company and blame all of their troubles on the sound card. It's been "the thing" for an awful lot of folks since Live! was a disaster on Win2K. I honestly have never had much trouble with anything Creative has made. Usually problems stem from PCI issues (or Cardbus glue logic if you're a Audigy PC Card user). I have no idea if the NF590 continues NF4's PCI saga. Do some Googlin'. Your A2ZS might be going downhill too, perhaps, though.

As for poor Creative and their bad rep, well, burying A3D didn't make them any friends. But people often don't realize that Aureal was built off of the leftovers of Media Vision, a company that was loaded with scandal and evil management (but some smart engineers). Aureal seemed to go down the same way. Poor management. I've always been kinda impressed that Creative has survived as long as they have. I'd put most of that success on their rather impressive level of diversification. I'm sure they wouldn't be around today if they were only building sound cards.

 

[Davros]

remember the days they used to make graphics cards...

 

[Albuquerque]

Having owned more than a few Creative Labs cards (back when AdLib and Creative were basically the only two providing sound in the PC space), I don't prefer to be called a Creative hater either.

However, at this moment in time, I still don't see the drastic need for an offboard audio card of any type. The onboard audio for my Dell e1505 and my Lenovo T60 are 100% (IMO) with my Sony E71 headphones. And my home setup with the onboard Envy24 24bit/192khz 7.1 audio doesn't make me want to upgrade either.

If hissing and "noise" are the reasons I should be upgrading, and I'm experiencing neither, then why spend the money?

 

[Davros]

well then Albuquerque i suggest you play half life and then play it with a soundblaster live, audigy or x-fi and see if your opinion remains the same....

the enviromental audio makes a hell of a difference

 

[Albuquerque]

well then Albuquerque i suggest you play half life and then play it with a soundblaster live, audigy or x-fi and see if your opinion remains the same....

the enviromental audio makes a hell of a difference

I have, and over my existing 7.1 audio system, it doesn't IMO. Honestly, I didn't tell a difference at all. Maybe I was doing something wrong? Maybe the person who had the X-Fi "Gamer" card didn't have it set up right? I dunno. He had the same speaker setup as I did, so I'm doubting that's it.

 

[Davros]

well you'd be missing reverb + echo particularly noticable in ventilation ducts
and the distortion effects when underwater

 

[Albuquerque]

well you'd be missing reverb + echo particularly noticable in ventilation ducts
and the distortion effects when underwater

I was already getting those on my Envy24 system... What else would I be missing?

And if you're going to say "well duh, performance when that reverb happens..." then I'm not really willing to hear it. HL2 does not suffer any performance problems on my current rig, so another few FPS would gain me a net of zero.

 

[Geo]

Well, I just went to Vista 64 from Vista 32, and for some reason that caused my X-Fi to puke and die (temporarily at least). The new (last week) X-Fi drivers are *worse* for my issue (whatever it is) than the previous set. With the old set I'd get some crackling and popping for awhile then it would quit playing sound altogether. With the new ones, it sounds like trying to find a radio station when there isn't one close enough to bring in well.

So I enabled the onboard Realtek AC97. . .Went out to Realtek's site and found they have recent Vista drivers. . . .and it all works just fine.

I wonder if this will prove to be a watershed event for me. The day I quit using discrete sound and never go back?

 

[swaaye]

I think it's just more early adopter pains. It's not like most companies have perfect Vista drivers yet. Creative has always been slow with supporting new OS's too. And that Realtek chip doesn't really do much so it's no surprise that it would be fairly simple to get working, I'd think.

I'm not going to Vista until I have a DX10 game to play. And at the current rate, I don't see that happening for a long time. I'm thinking Crysis might be the first that's worth the effort of buying the new OS and more RAM (I want 4 GB for it). It will be rather ridiculous if Creative can't get things sorted by then. I don't have an X-Fi though, just old Audigy 2.

 

[willardjuice]

Yeah Reltek still doesn't correctly support EAX 1/2 (though obviously in Vista they have no OpenAL drivers so it doen't really matter to Geo).

 

[Albuquerque]

With the utter lack of default HW acceleration under Vista, why would Creative's "standard" sound driver be so buggy? It would be understandable if we were talking about their OpenAL implementation and the whole EAX5 -> OpenAL and/or D3D -> OpenAL abstraction layer they're building...

But when we're just talking about normal Windows sounds and playing MP3's (ie, stuff that can be done even in software) how can they be that far off with an OS that's been out for six months? Not that ATI and NV were that much further ahead when Vista released, but they've made some serious inroads compared to Creative.

 

[Geo]

I also went from 2GB to 4GB of RAM as part of the upgrade to Vista 64-bit, but I'm puzzled why that would be relevant. Everything else seems to be working fine, including two 24/7 F@H clients and the rest of my hardware and software.

 

[Davros]

I was already getting those on my Envy24 system... .

Oh i didnt know I looked at the specs for that chip
http://www.via.com.tw/en/products/audio/controllers/envy24ht/

and i didnt see any support for eax or a3d ???

Edit: Looked a little deaper and it supports a3d and eax 2.0 and the envy24 is hardly what you would call basic audio yes its onboard (in your case)
but the envy24 is a proper hardware audio processor powering a number of standalone soundcards and when it comes to audio processing,
enviroment geometry, refelctions, occlusions ect its at the very least as powerfull as a sb-live , maybe even moreso

 

[willardjuice]

I also went from 2GB to 4GB of RAM as part of the upgrade to Vista 64-bit, but I'm puzzled why that would be relevant. Everything else seems to be working fine, including two 24/7 F@H clients and the rest of my hardware and software.

There are bugs with x64 (both XP and Vista) and 4GB systems with the X-Fi installed. There next patch should fix it.

 

[BRiT]

There are bugs with x64 (both XP and Vista) and 4GB systems with the X-Fi installed. There next patch should fix it.

That makes sense. In short, not all of Creative's driver is 64bit aware or capable. They need to fix the areas where it isn't.

Now here is why it occurs, at least why I suspect it occurs. It has to do with physical memory address space. When the system has less than 4Gigs total, the I/O and Registers are mapped below the 4Gig boundary. When the system has 4Gigs or more, most motherboards will remap the I/O and Registers for hardware to be above the 4Gig memory boundary. This is to provide the most amount of memory available for older OSes that are 32bit. In the 32Bit version of XP, MS does some tricks with PAE so that all device drivers see their memory region to be below this boundary. This eliminates the need for all device drivers to be updated.

This info can be dug up when reading up on Page Address Extensions under WinXP. Here's where I ran across this info before.

Some drivers might fail to load if PAE is enabled, because the device might be unable to perform 64-bit addressing or the drivers might assume that PAE mode requires more than 4 GB of RAM. Such drivers expect that they will always receive 64-bit addresses when in PAE mode and that they (or their device) are incapable of interpreting the address.

Other drivers might load in PAE mode but cause system instability by directly modifying system page table entries (PTEs). These drivers expect 32-bit PTEs, but receive 64-bit PTEs in PAE mode instead.

The largest driver PAE compatibility issue involves direct memory access (DMA) transfers and map register allocation. Many devices that support DMA, usually 32-bit adapters, are not capable of performing 64-bit physical addressing. When run in 32-bit mode, the device can address all physical address space. In PAE mode, it is possible that data would be present at a physical address greater than 4 GB. To allow devices with these constraints to function in this scenario, The Windows 2000 Server family and later provide double-buffering for the DMA transaction by providing a 32-bit address that is indicated by a map register. The device can perform the DMA transaction to the 32-bit address and the kernel copies the memory to the 64-bit address that is provided to the driver.

When the system runs with PAE disabled, drivers for 32-bit devices never require their map registers to be backed by real memory. This means that double-buffering is not necessary, since all devices and drivers are contained within the 32-bit address space. Based on testing of drivers for 32-bit devices on 64-bit processor–based computers, it is expected that most client-tested, DMA-capable drivers expect unlimited map registers.

To constrain compatibility issues, Windows XP Service Pack 2 includes hardware abstraction layer (HAL) changes that mimic the 32-bit HAL DMA behavior. The altered HAL grants unlimited map registers when the system is running in PAE mode. In addition, the kernel memory manager ignores any physical address above 4 GB. Any system RAM beyond the 4 GB barrier would be made unaddressable by Windows and be unusable in the system. By limiting the address space to 4 GB, devices with 32-bit DMA bus master capability will not see a transaction with an address above the 4 GB barrier. Because these changes remove the need to double-buffer the transactions, they avoid a class of bugs in some drivers related to proper implementation of double buffering support.

As a result of these changes to the HAL and memory manager, the impact to device driver compatibility is expected to be minimal on systems running Windows XP Service Pack 2 with data execution prevention enabled.

 

[RussSchultz]

My Dell e1505 has (crappy, hissy, cheap, worthless) Sigmatel audio card onboard. Using a (god/gods forbid, OMG sux0r) Radio Shack $3 1/8" DIN-to-RCA converter, I've plugged this thing into my home theater system several dozen times for listening to FLAC-encoded music.

You know what? At about 65% volume on the home equipment, I still don't hear any hiss. I must obviously be defective, because everyone in here just got done telling me that onboard audio (the Sigmatel was specifically mentioned) is cheap, hissy, crappy and generally worthless.

I gotta stand up for my company here(even though that division has been sold off). Sigmatel PC-Audio codecs are actually good performers, but rarely get to show off their capabilities for a couple of reasons.

First and fore-most is that the parts are cheap, and hence get used in 'low end' stuff. And low end manufacturers that are concerned about making the lowest cost product aren't necessarily interested in buying quality components to go along with their cheap AC97 codec, respinning boards to solve layout problems, or updating their drivers, etc.

Also, the parts are generally used on motherboards, which are notoriously noisy, couple that with the cheap manufacturers and you get...you guessed it, crappy output.

But as to what you're missing...it might have to do with the signal levels that are associated with line-out vs. headphones and the resultant change in SnR with respect to noise floors. Line out is .7v RMS, for example, whereas your headphone voltage swing is probably much lower (at the sound level where you want to listen to it). If the noise floor is .01V, for example (just pulling numbers out of my bum), and the SnR on line out w/.7V RMS is going to be much better than the .1VRMS you might have on your headphones.

And most of our parts do 'jack sense', which automagically detects what's plugged into the port, so it can tell headphones (8-32ohm) vs. line out (high impedence) and switches modes automatically.

Or, at least, that's my round about guess coming from the bits I hear around the office.

 

[Freak'n Big Panda]

quality for me is totally not an issue, it is true that some integrated sound is absolutely horrible (the chip on my moms laptop comes to mind) but my MSI Neo4 Platinum puts out sound that seems completely identical to what my friends xfi generates. Granted I do use digital out to an external receiver but even when using analogue out I can't tell a difference. Either my ears are shot (or just not trained maybe) or sound output quality is pretty much subjective.

Anyways does anybody have some links to benchmarks with modern games showing an improvement going from an integrated to discrete solution? If I can actually net a 10% performance increase I might just end up buying a Xfi.

 

[Ty]

Can anyone update me on the situation between Vista and Audigy? I have an Audigy 2 which is great but I'm holding off on my Vista install due to the driver problems, like losing support of some features, etc.

Does Creative have a soundcard that is 100% compatible with Vista (i.e. all the features work)? Or is there one in the works?

tks.

 

[Kaotik]

Can anyone update me on the situation between Vista and Audigy? I have an Audigy 2 which is great but I'm holding off on my Vista install due to the driver problems, like losing support of some features, etc.

Does Creative have a soundcard that is 100% compatible with Vista (i.e. all the features work)? Or is there one in the works?

tks.

My Audigy 2 works fine at least, I might be missing some functionality, but I don't care for it, my 5.1 works, my headphones work, all I care about really.

EAX in games using DirectSound3D don't work, but that's not due Creative or their drivers, it's due the fact that there's no such thing as (hardware accelerated) DS3D in Vista.
On X-Fi cards Creative does support a program called ALchemy, which emulates DS3D on many games via OpenAL, to make EAX work on them under Vista too, it's RUMORED that it will come later for Audigy 2's too though.