Creative Releases Version 2.18.0008 Sound Blaster X-Fi Driver

[Rebo&Zooty]

one thing i use the onboard predefined eq settings for is audio, i listen to alot of audio books, and honestly i hate having to tweak manualy for voice (creative and AD dont have a voice option in default eq presets last i checked)

and i agree IF the drivers are good the AD1988 and newer are far better chips then the realtek offerings BUT the huge flaw is that analog devices dosnt offer drivers dirrect from them, you gotta wait for Asus or the like to update their drivers, and many times they dont do it in a timely manner

I have tested, and yes theres a difference between a good sound card and onboard, but onboard also verys DRASTICALLY from board to board, I have tested 4 boards from diffrent makers with the same audio chipsets and all sounded notably diffrent, funniest part was the biostar board sounded better then the other brands yet was the cheapist board(tseries) the msi was "ok" the gigabyte was "ok" and the DFI was MEH at best(pretty bad, the 15$ addin 8768 card was better by far)

i miss the days of having choice, yamaha, crystal, avance logic and so on, really miss the yamaha cards....

 

[Wile E]

I agree - this is true for all hardware markets!

I can say, in regards to Creative over their drivers - it's nice to see that they're actually updating them more frequently now . . . we've seen more driver releases this year than we have over the last 3 years. That was one thing that would drive me up the wall, if there was a glitch, you'd either have to roll-back (which is hard to do with Creative's drivers), or wait a whole friggin year for the next update.


RealTek has also made great strides in cleaning up their issues . . . at one point, they were accused of some real shoddy drive practices, but that's not so much of an issues, now. Although, if you have the choice and onboard audio is a must for a new motherboard, it's better to go after one that uses an Analogue Devices solution than RealTek, IMO.

Personally, though, I can't stand onboard audio - take a look at my audio equipment guide, the first section (audio quality specs), I've compared "quality" onboard to a standalone card . . . the results, IMO, speak for themself.

I agree 100%. I tried out my Supreme FXII that came with my Maximus the other week for shits and giggles. It was like trying to compare a boombox to a proper receiver and speakers. Sounded absolutely terrible, even compared to my 5 year old Audigy 2.

 

[eidairaman1]

I really wonder how these drivers are since i havent upgraded the sound driver since 2006, awhile ago i tried a beta driver and that proved to be a headache as everything was laggin out, put the original driver in and no lag.

 

[swaaye]

PCI latency issues with audio cards is nothing new, it's been an ongoing issue with audio cards since 1996 when the first PCI card came out - I have an Ensoique multi-channel PCI card, built before Creative aquired them, and I had PCI issues with that card as well.

You know, it's nice to run into someone who actually has a clue occasionally.

I've been there too with the AudioPCI. And the Vortex 1/2 lines as well.

Pops and clicks caused by poor PCI implementations on motherboards. Creative's cards are not the problem most of the time. Not with the Live! or anything else they have made. Lots of mobo chipsets have had terrible PCI performance, even chipsets from ATI and NVIDIA. Some chipsets allow the graphics card to be rather exclusive in bus bandwidth/latency, causing problems for latency-sensitive audio cards. BIOS programmers can be at fault too when they screw up chipset feature parameters.

I really think only Intel knows how to make PCI work well.

 

[eidairaman1]

there are adjustments in the bios that you can change to fix those problems and i dont have problems with pops on my machine.

 

[Rebo&Zooty]

You know, it's nice to run into someone who actually has a clue occasionally.

I've been there too with the AudioPCI. And the Vortex 1/2 lines as well.

Pops and clicks caused by poor PCI implementations on motherboards. Creative's cards are not the problem most of the time. Not with the Live! or anything else they have made. Lots of mobo chipsets have had terrible PCI performance, even chipsets from ATI and NVIDIA. Some chipsets allow the graphics card to be rather exclusive in bus bandwidth/latency, causing problems for latency-sensitive audio cards. BIOS programmers can be at fault too when they screw up chipset feature parameters.

I really think only Intel knows how to make PCI work well.

yet other brands didnt have as many issues, such as turtle beach, crystal audio, avance logic, on and on, yeah some of the vortex cards had issues, but far less common then sblive having issues on the same boards.........

 

[imperialreign]

You know, it's nice to run into someone who actually has a clue occasionally.

I've been there too with the AudioPCI. And the Vortex 1/2 lines as well.

Pops and clicks caused by poor PCI implementations on motherboards. Creative's cards are not the problem most of the time. Not with the Live! or anything else they have made. Lots of mobo chipsets have had terrible PCI performance, even chipsets from ATI and NVIDIA. Some chipsets allow the graphics card to be rather exclusive in bus bandwidth/latency, causing problems for latency-sensitive audio cards. BIOS programmers can be at fault too when they screw up chipset feature parameters.

I really think only Intel knows how to make PCI work well.

the PCI latency issue has been an almost ongoing problem since 96 - at first, the audio cards, just coming off the ISA standard, were too slow for the PCI BUS, so PCI latency had to be tightened to accomodate the card. This was fine with most other PCI devices at the time.

Then there came a time when the common audio card was processing at a rate fairly equivalent with PCI BUS clocks - although this age was very short lived.

Next came the onslaught of the first "fast" audio processing cards, the Live! series in '98 - here we're back to adjusting PCI latency, loosening the clock cycle to allow the audio processor more time to the BUS to get the information it needed - wasn't too much of a hassle with most systems . . . unless you were running a PCI-based 3D accelerator. In which case, the two would be at each other's throats . . . and it was a major problem that was really only resolved by going to an AGP board.

there are adjustments in the bios that you can change to fix those problems and i dont have problems with pops on my machine.

most setups you can - except for a lot of OEM rigs. The BIOSes employed by the likes of Dell, eMachines, Gateway, etc. are fairly non-user friendly . . . and that's done intentionally to keep the majority of the "non-tech educated" from borking their system fiddling with stuff.

But, like I hinted at, without the ability to adjust PCI latency - you'll start running into problems. Big reason why I believe 90% of Creative's "issues" are related to the average Joe that goes out and purchases a pre-built rig at Best Buy, then 3 weeks later goes and purchases that $90 X-Fi at Best Buy and installs it himself . . . and doesn't realize he needs to turn off the onboard audio, and starts having system issues - and who gets the blame?

yet other brands didnt have as many issues, such as turtle beach, crystal audio, avance logic, on and on, yeah some of the vortex cards had issues, but far less common then sblive having issues on the same boards.........

Although, it's true many other audiocard offerings from other companies don't seem to have as many issues - I believe this falls back to both the companies market share, and how fast the chipset operates.

Some DSPs work rather slow, and the average PCI BUS clock cycle is more than enough for the card to get the information it needs without issues . . . but the EMUx0K1 processors are extremelly fast, BUS hungry, and want to move a ton of information per clock cycle - the first card to introduce the EMU line was the Live! series, followed by the Audigy . . . the X-Fis use a more up-to-date version, the CA20K1, which is even more aggressive in it's capabilities, and the X-Fi cards are extremelly BUS hungry and PCI aggressive, too (which has lead to a slew of issues with nVidia hardware).

Just to put it into perspective - the CA201K audio processing unit is capable of over 10,000 MIPS . . . which is roughly equal to the processing power of most Pentium 4s. If we're comparing the CA201K to a Pentium 4 in terms of processing power, then then next most popular audio DSP on the market, the C-Media 8788 chipset, would be equivalent to an Intel 486 CPU. Comparatively, which of the two CPUs are more BUS hungry, and powerful?

 

[Rebo&Zooty]

ah but cratives drivers make the x-fi the less "optimal" choice much of the time due to lacking features or buggy support, if you dont use moded/hacked drivers your stuck with a device thats crippled by its SHITTY driver support.

i haven't seen alot of company's with drivers as poorly done/updated as creative, and I have been seriously into computers since 98, they need to "step up" and give their stuff proper support.

and i would still take the 486 with decent drivers over the p4 with shit drivers, at least the features of the 486 are fully or more fully accessible/useable then the ones of the p4 as you put it.


good analigy here would be the ATI rage fury MAXX card, the card itself was solid and VERY powerful for its day, but the drivers made it a less then optimal choice(didn't even have proper 2k drivers....) so it didnt get any market share.

where the 3dfx cards and nvidia cards of the day had passable/decent even good drivers(they all still had their issues ofcorse, 3dfx lack of true ogl icd and full d3d support for starters) BUT the competitors all seemed to have better drivers, and thus less impressive hardware prevailed, just imagin if they had gotten out proper drivers for that card, same as the x-fi, they could have ruled the roost despite price.

meh, creative will keep going for now, tho their sales seem to currently mostly be driven by the auzen cards instead of their own cards, and even the auzen cards have issues due to their drivers being just a moded version of creatives.

I dont care if the cards onboard chip is a processor or not, i dont care if my cpu gets a 1-2% load from audio when gaming, i have more then enough cpu power to deal with that, i just care that IT WORKS LIKE IT SHOULD!!!!

In my experiance, most users feel as I do on this, as long as it works without hassles they are HAPPY, sure i would love to buy a high end card, but The added value of buying a $200 soundcard just isnt there for me.