at the time they where in the same market, and its 100% about what the HARDWARE can do, not something you can fake or scew with madeup bullshit.
and its not just to compare the x-med, this goes for ANY CARD USING THAT CHIP they all use the same drivers/driver base, this includes the razor shound card, alpha and omega's 80$ sound card, and a few others im to lazy to look up the proper names of.
now about your nvidia forceware drivers, last i checked they are in the 40mb range, but thats a videodriver that includes not only base 2d and 3d support along with control panil but also software for tvout, purevideo(video playback booster) as well as multi monotor support, so yeah the VIDEO drivers are big, but thats a diffrent topic all togather.
check creatives forums, i linked them, lots of reports of problems.
and not everybody sees problems, but those who do get NO HELP from creative, creative eather ignors them or tells them their other hardware/software is at fault.
those drivers you talk about being built into windows, they suck, the vista sblive drivers are USELESS AS HELL, people have been requesting WORKING sblive drivers for vista since it was in beta, you know why, alot of people payed damn good $ for their sblive 5.1 gamer/plat cards and would like to beable to use them PROPERLY under vista.
"Hardware accelerated audio, better music with the Crystalizer"
first off the audiophiles here who have tested the crystlizer here will tell you that its crap, hell ask grings, and the hardware accelerated audio....ROFL, yeah that dosnt work in vista m8, due to vistas design the drivers are only barly able to make use of the x-fi's hardware accelration, theres hack out there, but it dosnt work as well as the xp drivers did, this is due to vista not really being designed to support hardware accelerated audio.
as to saying the cmedia chips are all 100% cpu driven, thats bullshit, they do use the cpu for some fx and to do some small parts of the work but guess what, it dosnt make them any slower then the x-fi!!!!
examples of cmi based soundcard that have been rated higher then the x-fi for allaround quility of sound and use in GAMING as well as genral listening.
cmi8768/8768+,8770,8780 cards get better reviews for GAMING as well as music listening, im not just pulling this out of my ass, only somebody whos afrade to admit something they payed to much for may not be that great would dennie that there are better products, as to EAX,as stated in reviews and by other people here, its not all that, you may love it, but in my experiance its nothing special, and yes i have used an x-fi xgamer, audigy1, audigy2zs, and a stack of other cards, I wasnt impressed with them to be honest, mostly due to the drivers sucking.
why does an audio driver need to be 50mb for creative cards and only 5mb for another company and yet have the funtion?
oh note that if you look at the charts its made very clear that the x-fi when run in 7.1 mode can only do 96khz where as the cmi chips from the x-med and newer can do 192khz at 7.1, i know to you im sure this dosnt matter since you probbly have 2ch sound anyway.
I and others tho have full 5.1 or 7.1 setups that give REAL 3d sound in games and movies.
Sad to say but I can easly compare the x-fi I had to the ADI1988 my asus board had(infact the 1988 had better drivers dispite a couple buggs) and the realtek HD audio codec this board has, you know why, because i was one of those people whos system didnt like the x-fi, i fixed it after a few days of tinkering, and desided It was not speeding up games, it was not making things sound better and it was not worth what i spent on it, so i sold it to a buddy who ended up replacing it 4 months later with an 8768+ card from bluegears(auzentechs old name) because when he compared them at a buddys house the CMI based card sounded better in the games he played, in movies oh yeah and its driver control panil was better......i love xear software, it was on my old mobo's onboard sound(good design no eletronic noise, all the componants where shielded!!)
now about EAX being supported by a game engine, just because its supported by the engine dosnt mean that game dev's using the engine are going to use/implement it, infact there are lots of feturs in every game engine that devs dont use, one commonly un-used feture is the higher EAX supports, some engines have built in phsyics engines, yet alot of game devs went with havoc insted of using what was built into the engine(unreal2 engine games and even some unreal3 engine games are still using havoc)
point is that just because the engine can support it dosnt mean jack shit when a dev desides they dont want to deal with the hassle of supporting something the majority of their costmers arent gonna use, or because they just dont want to bother with the extra work of adding 5000 voices to a game to make x-fi owners feel better about their soundcards.
the pci-E x-fi is effectivly an AC97 HD codec 100% software driven but it supports all versions of EAX, if creative wasnt so damn stuck up they would make EAX and open standred like they did with eax2, allowing anybody to develop drivers to support it, but insted they eather refuse to licence the rights to creat said driver support OR they do something just as bad, set the price for a licence so high the company couldnt afford it.
auzen wanted to make their 8768 cards fully eax complyant, they ended up not doing it because the price creative wanted in order to let them do it would have made it so they didnt make anything on the cards they sold........
oh and the extream music gives you the specs of the APU not just the spicific card, the higher end x-fi cards basickly had one thing added, more of that effectivly useless audio ram or whatever its called, the thing that only has 1 game that takes advantage of it.......
compare the specs of the x-fi cards against that auzenteck card spec list!!!
and your anniligy of compairing 2400 to 8800 is way off, more like compairing 3870 EE to 8800gt, same market, close prices, diffrent makers.
in this case the cmedia chips win, because they where designed to be better for AUDIO QUILITY and their drivers are better made, anybody whos owned a cmedia card/chipset and used xear will likely tell you the same thing, its very easy to use, works well and offers tweaks that even the highest end creative cards dont(like proper speeker shifter abilities)
blah im gonna watch some more eureka 7
Where does that makes sense?
That's called downsampling 
