Wednesday, March 26th 2008
Creative: ASUS Misleading Customers on EAX Drivers
PC sound card maker Creative Labs said in a e-mail message today that rival hardware manufacturer ASUS is misleading its customers by claiming that new drivers for ASUS sound cards support EAX 3,4 and 5, a set of environmental enhancements for sound in games. Responding to an announcement by ASUS that newly released drivers for its Xonar line of sound cards support EAX, Creative communications VP Phil O'Shaughnessy said that the drivers effectively trick games into outputting EAX-capable sound, but they don't actually fully support it. "There are a small number of PC game titles that specifically query the audio device on the system to see if EAX 5 is available before they will attempt to render more than 64 3D simultaneous audio voices," O'Shaughnessy said. "The new ASUS drivers are falsely reporting EAX 5 capabilities in order to get these games to output 3D audio on ASUS sound cards. ASUS customers are not getting a genuine EAX Advanced HD experience with this driver update. Furthermore, the several hundred games that support EAX 3 or EAX 4 for delivering in-game effects will not provide those effects from ASUS sound cards." he added. ASUS representatives are still awaited to comment on the story.
Sources:
Shacknews, Boot Daily
94 Comments on Creative: ASUS Misleading Customers on EAX Drivers
and i refuse to spend 4hrs of the costmers payed time fixing something that SHOULD JUST WORK, and in 8/10 cases x-fi cards have issues in systems im asked to fix/reinstall, u know how many xtream music card systmes i had brought in because of teh 100% cpu use bugg? probbly 150-200, all due to the drivers being bugged, sure there4 where hax to get around the problem, but they didnt work the same on every system, and in the end it was cheaper for the costmer to just get a diffrent HIGHER QUILITY card.
see lets add it up, the shop charges the client 45/hour for work, at 4hrs thats 180bucks+tax, then compare that to selling them a 80-120$ card and giving them 1/2 off, thats 40-60bucks out of the costmers pocket, better value and less problems.......so its a win for everybody but creative, then the owner went and put the creative cards on ebay for 20-30bucks each(less then 1/3 their value even used) and made back some of what we lost selling them the card at such a disscount.
also makes fixing the system the next time the user comes in faster since we dont have to worrie that its the creative driver causing their problems.
If you don't like the product, exchange it and be done with it.
For the vast majority of Creative users, though, there hasn't been any issues.
eather way, you had to spend EXTRA $ on a 90-150$ card that SHOULD JUST WORK!!!!!
But I'm tired of hearing this crap that EVERYONE that buys a Creative product will have issues. And then the following Creative bashing.
The issue with the X-Fi and the nForce4 is a bit different, though, as it only happend with nVidia cards. The X-Fi's are massive BUS hogs . . . but then again, what dedicated processing unit isn't? nVidia with those boards, had setup the BUS to allow for great bandwidth with their GPUs - and that's where it all started. It wasn't just Creative's design flaw, but also nVidia's design flaw.
Further from that, those early X-Fi cards didn't have a heatsink on the APU, either, and that lead to a lot of problems as the processor and capacitors would start overheating.
Newer revisions don't really have those issues.
i would happly talk nice about creative if they stoped sucking on such large numbers of computers.
nvidias onboard soundstorm rocked, i never had problems getting it working, to bad they didnt move to offer it as a standalone APU that would have been nice.
creative just needs to eather get their act togather or move away from making their own cards and just licence the right to make cards/drivers to other companys, if they did that i would bet companys like auzen would get out decent drivers given enought time.
This is becoming a flame war because people are strangely addicted to taking sides. If they like one side, they argue everything the other side says. its a stupid habit that annoys the hell out of me (dont take this as aimed at you, btw)
For every person that is sick of creative getting bashed, is someone sick of being told to stop bashing creative when they have a serious problem. thus the flames begin.
Soundstorm was probably one of the best early onboard soultions, but I still found the chipsets of terrible audio quality when compared to expansion cards. Even current on-board solutions fail in those respects.
Again, I remind everyone that it's not just Creative who've had a lot of issues with audio components over the years, or issues with Vista - I still don't understand why they're the only ones targeted . . . oh, because they have the majority of the market! Just like why everyone complains that WIN isn't as safe as Mac's OS . . . lol, silly me!
:shadedshu no, s'all good - I ain't ever had a problem with ya yet, why start now, eh?! :D I agree this thread has gone down the toilet as well, though.
and creative gets this much flack because they do NOTHING ABOUT THEIR DRIVERS SUCKING ASSS, then they tell the one person trying to fix them to SHOVER OFF and STOP because they want to sell more shitty x-fi cards that still dont work in vista over a year after its initial relece........
if creative wanted to fix it they could, they could have started from scratch and build new drivers from the ground up by now 5x over if not more, and had it FULLY fixed, but they dont want to they just want to keep selling the same SHIT drivers to everybody, hence people bitch about them the most.
if i spent 150+ on a sound card i would expect proper driver support for many years to come.....and from any body but creative i would get driver updates that acctualy work/fix stuff.........even via......VIA one of the worst names in the industry for driver updates has managed to get their audio chips working on vista!!!!!!
im not trying to flaim creative or anybody else, its just that this situation acctualy effects me, and has driven me mad!!!!!
for the love of god, creative please just hire some compotent driver programers to build your cards some decent drivers!!!!
I never said, either, that Creative's cards can't share an IRQ - just that they don't like to. Just like many VGA adapters don't like to share an IRQ, either - even operating on PCI-E.
There's other things at work with IRQ settings related to Creative's, as well as other manufacturers hardware as well - and has a lot to do with how WIN handles hardware resources, regardless of what settings are dictated in BIOS: support.microsoft.com/kb/314068 <-again, why I recommend installing audio hardware drivers before other components.
Part of the problem being, is that WIN does not view an audio device as being resource heavy like it does other components, and therefore usually gets slapped with another device on that IRQ channel.
again, the X-Fi cards DO work in Vista, but some features don't work correctly - and it revolves around the WASAPI and not Creative's drivers. On top of that, other audio card manufacturers are having similar issues as Creative in the Vista arena. Get your facts straight.
Although I'm using a creative product :(
Damn, 3991! Didn't even notice you were back! :toast:
Auzentech > ASUS
^Though I use both Creative and Auzen....and ASUS products.
A lot of bad blood is spilt in this thread thanks to irrational arguments by a hate-kate who beleives in flame-baiting without valid arguments/logic and then waits for someone's support and throws a thanksgiving dinner though I admit I was drawn into it. Creative so far hasn't given me any reason to complain though I'm ready to join Muzz when Creative rolls out a successor to the X-Fi series and decides to play foul with X-Fi and its support in future platforms. Yes ALchemy being non-free for Audigy users is a scam but Creative (and not me) has an explaination for it. All of this wouln't have happened if Microsoft didn't decide to scrap DirectSound from the DirectX 10 specs thereby affecting a system component that Creative's products explicitly depend on, because they are hardware accelerated audio and DirectSound is supposed to make an audio application talk directly to audio hardware. ALchemy emulates DirectSound for Vista, makes an app to beleiving it could communicate with the hardware directly, while in reality it merely carries the audio stack through WASAPI and steps up latency...which is why benches proved Game + Vista + ALchemy + Creative hardware to perform worse than Game + XP + Creative hardware.
But I agree with the sentiments about Alchemy for Audigy. Making people pay for it is total BS.