Sunday, February 18th 2007
Creative Responds to lack of Vista support
Creative has responded to the Inquirer reguarding their article on Creatives Lack of vista support. Story can be seen here. The creative PR responded "We have been working on the Vista project for quite some time, having released beta drivers late last year for the beta community and endeavored to keep our customers up to date regularly via our Vista update site and forum feedback."
For those who wish to have a timeline for the release of more polished creative drivers here are a few dates to look for. March 5th, and March 8th. On March 5th Creative targets delivery of the Audigy series drivers, this is suprising to many seeing that the X-Fi series is newer than the Audigy Series and is being released at a later date.
In continuation of what the Creative PR said to The Inquirer, "The changes to the audio implementation and subsystem were quite major, requiring a fundamental rewrite of the driver model and features to take account of the lack of direct hardware support" and continued saying, "Additionally, removingDirectX 3DAudio hardware support required a work-around, in the form of Creative Alchemy, which was available before Vista hit the retail shelves to restoremulti-channel EAX audio." ( 'Alchemy'for those who do not know is a middle-ware solution to Microsoft's troublesome removal of direct hardware support in DirectX.)Creative also said that the current changes in Microsoft WHQL proceedures have also been time consuming.
Source:
TheINQ.com
For those who wish to have a timeline for the release of more polished creative drivers here are a few dates to look for. March 5th, and March 8th. On March 5th Creative targets delivery of the Audigy series drivers, this is suprising to many seeing that the X-Fi series is newer than the Audigy Series and is being released at a later date.
In continuation of what the Creative PR said to The Inquirer, "The changes to the audio implementation and subsystem were quite major, requiring a fundamental rewrite of the driver model and features to take account of the lack of direct hardware support" and continued saying, "Additionally, removingDirectX 3DAudio hardware support required a work-around, in the form of Creative Alchemy, which was available before Vista hit the retail shelves to restoremulti-channel EAX audio." ( 'Alchemy'for those who do not know is a middle-ware solution to Microsoft's troublesome removal of direct hardware support in DirectX.)Creative also said that the current changes in Microsoft WHQL proceedures have also been time consuming.
15 Comments on Creative Responds to lack of Vista support
I'm sorry, creative seems to use "it's a lot of work" as an excuse all too often.
I mean that was their official reason for not using PCI-E on their newer cards too....
I own one because it's standard, and the drivers for x64 XP work well, but I think we all put up with a little too much crap from them..... just because they're the default.
All my Creative cards have had great sound WHEN they worked, but as always from Creative BAD SOFTWARE. In fact I spent almost 6hrs on Sat redoing both mine and my wifes machines snd cards(Audigy 2 ZS and X-Fi Fatality) wiping them both clean and starting form scratch. I mean both of them worked "okay" but mine the EQ was broken and would lock up my Console in any mode, and on hers she has a Zen V Player so we use Creative Media Source for Rip/Burn library stuff for ease of compatibility(sic?)and it would play one song then lock up.
Both of those things may seem small but its always those stupid little things that break in Creatives software. I mean yes they NEED a working Vista driver but CMON why dont you at least get on for the current OS that the MAJORITY of users are on and at least get ONE set of decent drivers before you start on your next set of what Im sure will be years of the same "little things" with Vista and the XP drivers will just always be buggy.
creative has been like this since the LIVE days, i stoped using them for my own systems after the LIVE, i have and own audigy1/2/3/4 cards(got them all used out of tradein comps) but i only keep them incase for some reasion i cant get onboard working or cant get another brand card working.
creative has POOR support at best, they blame board/chipset/other hardware makers for errors/flaws in their software/hardware, look at the x-fi, read their forums, they blame the nf4 chipset for problems with x-fi, yet any other brand of soundcard u get will work FINE in nf4 boards.
as i have said b4 go cmedia for gaming+audio/movie stuff or VIA/Cmedia for audio(music and movies and such, via drivers suck for games)
or if your board has decent onboard use that, hdaudio onboard seems to be great as long as you use current updated drivers!!!!
and it dependson the driver used and chip used, realtek are so/so, with up to date drivers(from realtek) its about as good as normal audigy for sound quility.
the ADI 1988 codecs acctualy in many ways are BETTER then x-fi, read the specs/whitepapers/data sheets to see why, eax is dead under vista, read up on how it works, and unlike many people think number of voices isnt bound to eax, its bound to hardware and software, cmedia's current chip can do 128voices(same as x-fi) but it can also do 192khz@7.1ch where as the x-fi can only do 96khz at 7.1, thats a huge quility diffrance :)
compare your x-fi with the razer or auzentech or omega hd or turtlebeach cards based on the 8788 chip, the x-fi looses in every way, even games tested by hard core gamers.
creative would be decent if they would test their hardware first AND make DECENT SOFTWARE, insted of teh bloated CRAP they have now.
i get so sick of "creatives the only way to game" its as untrue as "nvidia: the way its ment to be played" bouth are bs, its about hardware+software
good hardware is as bad as SHITTY hardware if its backed by SHITTY software(drivers)
low end "crappy" hardware can shine if the company puts time and effort into making good drivers, hence the 8738 and 8768 and even 9761a cmedia codecs/chips can really shine with current up-to-date drivers, because cmedia has bothered to update and debug drivers, oh yeah and the drivers are SMALL less then 1/10 the size of creatives driver+controle center, thats sad since the cmi drivers all include a BETTER THEN CREATIVE control center tool(xear)
look up some reviews where x-fi is compared with the razer or auzentech's latest card, u will be supprised im sure :) better 3d possitional audio, higher quility audio in games and music/movies, sure its more $ then a cheap x-fi, but u can get the same chip in the OMEGA brand for a reasonable price(for a high end soundcard that is) i have installed 2 razer cards and 3 x-med...whatever(auzentech cards) so far and they all went in flawless, nf4,nf5,nf6100,ati 1600,nf3 all accepted the cards without a hitch(one of the nf4 systems simply wont work wth x-fi due to the drivers sucking and hardware not being truely pci complyant) but we slaped in a razer soundcard and it worked in seconds, no studdering, no poping/cracking just clean strong wonderfull sound.
its just as annoying reading about annoyed users as well when they themselvs knew before hand of the low compatability and performance of vista in the first place. it will be a long while before vista becomes a majority os.
its only a matter of time before they decide to drop accelerated gfx support and it all has to be done in software or virtualised on hardware.
microsoft certainly screwed up creative tho',just when they release the x-fi card,microsoft release vista whiich undid all the good things about the x-fi.
will the x-fi support hardware accelerated opengl tho when the driver is sorted? and will this alchemy thing slow the x-fi down? its not just having to decode it now it seems its having to convert from one thing to another on vista.
also does the x-fi natively support opengl and just needs the driver or does the driver enable opengl,or summat?
Do they need to master ALL of them? No, probably not, & not for this project, but the point's there... PLUS, DirectX 10 changed things as well, & imo? Coding DirectX is harder than say OpenGL based on my experience's with them (for display API coding that is, DirectX as you all know, controls a LOT more than just display).
Plus, I'd imagine that Windows VISTA changed the DDK (device driver kit) quite a bit, because of the changes to it, vs. it's predecessor in Windows Server 2003, which VISTA is based off of.
I say that occurred, most likely because the OS itself changed a LOT @ that level (under the pretty AERO GLASS skin in usermode/Ring3/RPL3 stuff, down into kernelmode/Ring 0/RPL 0 stuff) & the development teams out there have to adjust. It has changed quite a bit there... Address Space Randomization features in VISTA (a good thing for security) alone tells me so.
Some teams adjust faster than others too. A given.
We've seen this before guys:
DOS/Win3.x -> Win9x -> NT -> 2000 (the most radical change periods imo, where we had to wait not ONLY for drivers many times, but also applications for various purposes period to appear)!
HEY, imo @ least though? This is the least of anyone's worries w/ VISTA... drivers'll come. Again, we've seen this type of thing, before, we lived.
DRM & OpenGL being pulled? Man... to me, this is bothersome.
APK
P.S.=> I wouldn't get a piece of hardware for VISTA that didn't have a driver... I would either sell it if it did not have one (& I could not be patient, sometimes you can't) OR buy one that did... apk
vista can have hacked in hardware accelerated audio, but it takes time and testing, something creatives never been good at(testing isnt their strong suit)
ms made this move for a good reasion tho, to stop all the crap about "eax2 vs eax3 vs eax4, vs eax5" and such same reasion they made dx10 the way they did, they want to bring everybody as close to being on the same page as possable, the problem is that they also cut out some nice things, like the option to use vendor/chip spicific calls,(true for bouth sound and video really) but by doing that they are hoping to avoid another fx line vs r300 situation where a card came out that COULDNT do what it was sold to do.
frustrating for ms as well as nvidia and any gamer whos tryed to use their "dx9" fx card in dx9 mode.
creative is not being forced to acctualy do real driver development, duno if they are up to the task...