Soundcards with decent vista suport

[Flewis]

Creative XFI sound drivers at the moment appear to be dire by all accounts and i was wondering whether any of the decent high end sound cards had decent driver support?

Its all well and good advising people away from creative but what are the alternatives?

[toolsong]

http://www.rme-audio.de/en_products_hdsp_9632.php

Stereo only
No hardware extensions for gaming
Sounds fantastic!

[this_is_gav]

Hold back until the UK get some Auzentech X-Meridian 7.1s? There's a few places claiming they'll have stock in a few days (Scan included), but whether it materialises is another matter.

Auzentech only have beta drivers out for Vista, but they simply can't be worse than the Creative ones.

//edit: I lie. Scan have it on pre-order but no ETA. I think it was one of the Terratec cards I was thinking of (all of which appear to have stock now). Was other etailers I must have been thinking of.

[s_kinton]

You can discount pretty much the entire Creative product line with regards to Vista support. My Audigy 4 works fine in vista, but with alot of options not available.

[wmsteele]

Why are Creative not sorting this issue out? It makes no sense to have no Vista drivers available for what is probably to biggest selling audio card on the market.

Surely their must be more to this story, have Creative fallen out with Microsoft???

[toolsong]

Have you seen or heard of the mess regarding Vista drivers on their support forums?

Puts the "Fiesty Hexus" thread to shame

[wmsteele]

Apart from reading the initial reaction to Vista when it was launched I haven't been following it very closely. I'm very happy with my current installation of XP, until dx10 becomes an issue I can see me upgrading.

I had assumed like every other launch of Windows eventually all the major players would have drivers ready for their current / recent hardware. It's unbelievable that Creative have left users is limbo for such a long time. This is another issue that would discourage me from upgrading to Vista. Surely a resolution will be forthcoming....

[this_is_gav]

Why are Creative not sorting this issue out? It makes no sense to have no Vista drivers available for what is probably to biggest selling audio card on the market.

Some seem to think there's a PCIe product (line?) coming along to milk the Vista crowd. That's all very likely I guess, but the timing suggests this isn't the reason for the delay in drivers.

The simple fact is Creative have been the laziest (major) company on the planet for developing drivers for years now.

[Tel_Tech]

Bear in mind XFI sound quality in Vista is borked on account of it being defaulted to 16bit instead of 24bit playback. You can adjust that in Playback Device settings as I recall and it made a big difference on my Audigy2 when I was having issues.

[shaithis]

Creative have had working drivers since vista was in beta. Yes, I had to change a few settings after installing them to get things to my liking but sound cards are very configurable devices and that's always been the case regardless of manufacturer or OS.

I'm currently running Vista x64 with an XFi (hell, even an 8800GTX as well) without driver issues.

It seems to be very fashionable at the moment to completely knock a company if "someone has heard about someone with a vista driver problem"

[aidanjt]

Microsoft knocked the legs out from under CL with the new UM audio driver model and took the direct out of direct sound, CL is using OpenAL as a work around for this but obviously the support is basic at best, it'll take some time until they're up to XP standards, Vista is rather pathetic for audio period anyway, if you want decent sound, you're going to have to step back operating system wise. Given CL's world renound reputation for driver development (or lack thereof, Linux users have been waiting for X-Fi drivers for a year and a half and it's currently looking like it'll be 2 and a half before beta drivers are out), I wouldn't hold your breath as far as strong Vista driver support goes.

[this_is_gav]

It seems to be very fashionable at the moment to completely knock a company if "someone has heard about someone with a vista driver problem"

It's equally fashionable to look around and find thousands who are experiencing the exact same problems you are. I'm yet to find a single Audigy 2/4 (Pro, or with breakout box - not the cheapo cut down versions) user who can get 5.1 in Vista x64 final. It seems with Vista x86 you can sometimes get lucky by forcing it to use the XP drivers...

It says it all really.

[TooNice]

The simple fact is Creative have been the laziest (major) company on the planet for developing drivers for years now.

The sad part is, the X-Fi line is still one of the better gaming/entertainment card around.

*Ponders how things might have been if Aureal was still around*

People often given MS/Intel/Apple a hard time, but to me, Creative deserves more.

[aidanjt]

Well... MS and Apple deserve it, Creative just deserve it more than both combined for being worthless as far as support is concerned.