Soundcards an outdated concept?

[willardjuice]

it's RUMORED that it will come later for Audigy 2's too though.

ALchemy will come out for Audigy users, but it will cost them extra.

 

[Murakami]

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

Envy24 does DS3D and EAX1/2 in software: HL2 does everything (audio related) in software and so it's not the best example to show off X-Fi power and features.

 

[Malo]

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 wife and I run vista and X-Fi XtremeGamers and we're fine with windows programs and games so far. In fact, we both switched to X-Fi's from Realtek onboard because of the problems we had with the Realteks and OpenAL. Since moving to X-Fi, no more BSODs.

As far as all the features working? No they don't, barely any of the features are working. None of their software runs on Vista and there's no Dolby Digital output afaik either. You can use a 3rd party hack called youpax to get the creative software support though it's a little buggy of course.

 

[willardjuice]

Dolby Digital output afaik either

Creative supports DD/DTS pass through on both x86 and x64 flavors of Vista. They don't support hardware decode of DD/DTS into 5.1 analog officially because of "DRM restrictions in Vista" (although it's supported in the drivers they make for Dell, so all one needs to do is install the latest drivers from Creative's site, then copy two files from the old Dell drivers into their System32 folder to have hardware decode restored).

However even without hardware decode, one can still use software decoders like PowerDVD, ac3filter, etc to decode DD/DTS into 5.1 analog for movies and such. Only when one uses the S/PDIF in for things like Xbox360, dvd player, etc is hardware decode required (since no software decoder works with S/PDIF in atm). This only affects a (very) small group of people.

So X-Fi supports DD/DTS, but people are still pretty pissed that hardware decode only works in drivers that Creative provides for Dell (although like I said any Creative driver can be hacked into supporting hardware decode).

 

[Malo]

Thanks for that clarification, good information to know.

 

[Davros]

murakami i was refering to half life 1
which does use hardware

 

[swaaye]

Well if you're gonna mess with HL1 you ought to be running Win9x and some board with a Vortex 2 chip.

I do struggle to think up examples of EAX being put to good use.

 

[Davros]

my legacy machine has a vortex 2 chip

 

[AlexV]

Well if you're gonna mess with HL1 you ought to be running Win9x and some board with a Vortex 2 chip.

I do struggle to think up examples of EAX being put to good use.

People harp about it being used quite well in BF2142 or whatever. Dunno if it`s true though.

 

[Davros]

that could be more due to the fact battlefield is possibly the only game to use the x-fi's 64mb of onboard ram

 

[willardjuice]

that could be more due to the fact battlefield is possibly the only game to use the x-fi's 64mb of onboard ram

Quake 4 and some other game uses it too; I remember it being three games. Though obviously that's still a very low market.

 

[Davros]

The other game would famously be doom3 it was a case of make doom3 use eax-hd or we'll sue you ass for nicking our shadow algorithm...

found this bit of info about doom3:

" It was interesting to listen to Carlo's report at Game Developer Forum 2005 with heart-rending intimate details about updating the sound engine in DOOM3. For example, the soft engine operated 256 channels with a dozen real-time OGG decode processes in memory and the algorithm of random time shift of channels to avoid buffer overflow. Support for DirectSound + all existing EAX4 features was hardly introduced by rewriting the audio code from scratch. Creative had to overhaul the entire OpenAL and release a special new version. Besides, it had to rewrite drivers for all its sound cards for DOOM3 alone.

But the end justified the means. Patch 1.3 increased the FPS performance to +25%, 3D audio was cardinally improved and got the main EAX4 feature — Multi-Environment.

 

[Albuquerque]

<snip>
But the end justified the means. Patch 1.3 increased the FPS performance to +25%, 3D audio was cardinally improved and got the main EAX4 feature — Multi-Environment.

I would be interested in the link to this snippet, especially where they provide the data and benches that back up that 25% claim. I've googled for 20 minutes now (granted, on a slow connection) and can find absolutely zero that can back up that story.

Not saying it isn't true, but until I see some even semi-scientific backing for how they came to that number, I'm taking it with a huge brick of salt.

 

[Davros]

good job i remembered the link

here ya go
http://www.digit-life.com/articles2/multimedia/creative-x-fi-part3.html

if you replace the part3 bit with part2 ect you'll find the rest of the review

 

[Albuquerque]

good job i remembered the link

here ya go
http://www.digit-life.com/articles2/multimedia/creative-x-fi-part3.html

if you replace the part3 bit with part2 ect you'll find the rest of the review

Ok, but where are the benches?

I see three bargraphs that outline "test 1", "test 2" and "avg" framerates(?), and I have only a scant few questions. Namely:

Where is this patch for UT2K4?
What level is this?
Processor(s) benched with?
Quantity, type and speed of memory in the machine?
Video card make, model, driver, onboard ram, and rendering settings (OGL, D3D, software?)
What was the "other" audio codec being used? With what driver? How many speaker channels being driven?
What OS was being used?

None of these are provided. At all. What exactly are these bargraphs supposed to tell anyone?

Edit:
Humorously enough, after reading a while, I'm not sure about the conclusion in this article. The barcharts "clearly" show gains (with who knows what settings), but their synthetic testing yielded completely opposite results:

We had serious problems determining X-RAM advantage in synthetic tests. Even most thorough tests with all performance bottlenecks in code removed demonstrate tenths of a single percent

Here's another humorous snippet:

Our tests showed that changing a number of buffers, a size and memory load to emulate a load on the processor-memory bus reveal no noticeable X-RAM advantages. In case of a P4 3.4 GHz CPU, enabling X-RAM reduces the CPU load by just 0.1%. But changing a number of buffers adequately changes the CPU load manifold.

Now, with framerates between 40hz and 60hz for their UT2K4 testing, I can't safely assume they were testing with that same P4 3.4 rig -- unless they were running at 2048x1536 at 2xAA an ATI x800.

WHere do we get to the part where hardware sound acceleration is winning us benchmarks? Gimmie some real numbers, not some "test 1" vs "test 2" pie-in-the-sky deal.