Fed up of XFI driver problems? Read this.

[dangel]

Very true.

[Agent]

Perhaps MS did us all a massive favour by changing the sound model in Vista then?

Only if it bankrupts Creative. Otherwise its just made the end users the victims here

[shaithis]

The funny thing is (and seems to be the case with a lot of things like this) I am running an XFi in Vista without any issues. With 8GB of RAM. No crackling, no blue screens, no lock ups. 24/7 stable, to the point where my PC is normally on for weeks at a time.

Its worked flawlessly since the first or second driver update creative released after the official launch of Vista.....Which has been quite a while now.

As for cost, I think people need to look at the price of these cards before calling creative expensive. These cards are equally at the top-end prices for a home PC soundcard.

The only redeeming features of these cards that I can see are:

- PCI-Express interface
- Its not creative (for the I love to hate creative crowd)
- They come with Dolby Digital Live (I fully expect to see DDL drivers for XFi any day anyway)

Price is actually more expensive when compared to Creatives offering (the ones with breakout boxes are more expensive but that's because you are paying for the break-out box)


They do look nice but I really do feel that anyone dumping an XFi card for one of these may feel a bit gutted once the fun factor of having a new piece of hardware wears off, although for a new build I would probably use one if only for the PCI-E interface, although most people I know would never spend that much on a sound card, especially when they see XFis for a quarter of the price.

[Uriel]

Apart from... $89 for the DX. What's that - under £50? Sure the D2 and D2X are pricey but these look like an utter bargain. They're going to completely outclass X-Fis in the same price range. XtremeAudio is basically an Audigy anyway so I'm not counting it.

If I could use my X-fi with 4GB RAM in vista, I'd be keeping it. It's been the best soundcard I've owned yet. I suspect the problem has more to do with peculiarities of my hardware configuration than Creative though. As it is, I'm looking for an alternative. The Asus cards look the most likely at the moment.

[dangel]

Ah, so you're the lucky one then?

~45 quid is what we're talking here (Xonar DX) BTW.

Seriously - i'm glad you've had issues but i've experienced enough myself to really put me off creative's malformed drivers for life - as have a heck of a lot of other people (apparently). Now that EAX is no longer relevant, and (apparently) hardware acceleration isn't either why not investigate the alternatives if you're suffering?
Weird how the cpu utilisation was lower with the Xonar too isn't it?

In fact, I'd go so far as to suggest the Xonar DX offers the best combination of features, performance, and value of any desktop PC sound card on the market. It's no wonder, then, that we've given it our Editor's Choice award.

Some redemption beyond your suggestion?

[shaithis]

If your having troubles and cannot resolve them, then you are absolutely correct.

I just sometimes wonder what people are doing when things are working perfectly fine for me and I haven't done anything special, its rather bemusing.

[dangel]

If your having troubles and cannot resolve them, then you are absolutely correct.

I just sometimes wonder what people are doing when things are working perfectly fine for me and I haven't done anything special, its rather bemusing.

A lot of creative's 'issues' are with 'certain' chipsets - or so it seems. This might explain why problems occur for some and not others. But who really knows? All I know is that one of the reasons I didn't switch to Vista for gaming is I couldn't get the darn XFI to behave 100% all of the time. I ended up using hacked Auzentech drivers to disable the '5.1 channels of screaming white noise' feature I got when I dared to put 4gb of RAM in my system and even then had to switch to 7.1 to get more than stereo. Creative are quick to blame a chipset or MS (for the Vista changes) in my eyes - and yet it all works fine on my XP partition. Interesting.

I've not bothered to try the march driverset yet though - so maybe everything's peachy now. I reserve the right to say "well **** me" if they actually work properly this time.

[Rosaline]

What's not mentioned about the card is the OpenAL support. I suspect that like the EAX, it has to be done on the CPU. Given that OpenAL is an open standard that anyone can make drivers for, I'm surprised that so few companies are supporting it fully.

That's the real problem in the market today. Most people are happy with onboard sound, and audiophiles are rare but buy mainly on the sound quality. Gamers, I suspect, form a significant proportion of sound card buyers, yet there is little real competition with Creative.

This is why I'm glad to see Asus attempting to steal that EAX 5 functionality. Creative desperately need some competition like the old days, so that they will be forced to get their drivers in order and actually innovate.

I'm actually quite disappointed with Creative with respect to innovation. Given the low cost of the ram they were using, it was strange that it was not included across the board (and by not doing so, few developers would dare to bother using it). EAX 5 mainly added more channels, and I've heard very little about genuine innovation to allow for easier development and implementation of sound and music features. Where's the high quality text to speach?

Of course, being an XP user, I'm quite happy with my X-fi notebook (3fps extra in oblivion means a lot! ). But I'm glad to see some competition beginning to form. We just need far more, cutting directly into their perceived market dominance.

[med2003]

Looks like Creatives Vista drivers are lurching from bad to worse. This thread on their Vista forums seems to indicate that their latest couple of Vista X-Fi drivers break the junctions in Vista (see the thread). This could mean that some "old" (XP compatible) software you had running could stop running once the new Creative drivers have been installed.

Edit: It also seems to affect the recent Daniel K X-Fi drivers.

creative drivers break windows vista junctions - Windows Vista - Creative Labs

[dangel]

Think about this - crysis has it's own sound engine. It ignores EAX entirely.

I think that's only going to become the default in the future for gaming in all honesty.

[Rosaline]

EAX already isn't the default for new games any more OpenAL seems to be steadly taking its place now

(and OpenAL is entirely able to be accelerated in hardware, it's an open standard, manufacturers just have to bother...)

[Betty_Swallocks]

Well i went over to Vista and then back to XP, not because of any problems with my xFi card but because I couldn't get drivers for some other hardware I have. Notably an Ergodex controller.
My Xfi worked absolutely fine under Vista.

I can understand peoples attitude to Creative if you've had problems but I can say, hand on heart, that my Xfi is the best sound card I've ever had. It's not a professional music makers card but that's not what I bought it for and it's not priced like one.

I use it for games and for listening to music and the improvement in sound quality over my old Audigy 2 is amazing. When my friends heard it most of them went out and bought one too because it was so much better than the cards they had.

Personally I think the problem is not so much Creative but Vista. So many bits of hardware are poorly or not at all supported that it seems to me that it can't be a manufacturer problem but more likely an OS one.

[dangel]

Personally I think the problem is not so much Creative but Vista. So many bits of hardware are poorly or not at all supported that it seems to me that it can't be a manufacturer problem but more likely an OS one.

I'd like (almost) to agree - but other manus have managed much better. That and a well established history of skanky drivers from Creative.

Don't get me wrong - the XFI (when it works) sounds great (hence i bought one) but really their amateurish attempts at Vista drivers have failed to impress me. I'm not pushing Asus as the saviour of sound, moreover i'm saying that on the Vista platform we're no longer reliant on EAX (and therefore the creative monopoly). Perhaps we're not even that reliant on hardware acceleration in a world of multi-core cpus? This can only be a positive thing to my mind for end users - the more the merrier!

[this_is_gav]

It's not just Vista either. It's been this way all the way back to 2000 and XP - perhaps earlier. A new OS has Creative giving drivers months after everyone else - if it's not drivers it's the accompanying software. Vista just shows what an awful job they can do - an OS that many enthusiasts had had available to them for what, 8 months before release, with manufacturers surely having releases before that and frequently having access to builds the public were never meant to see. NVIDIA were bad... there's no negative good enough for Creative's approach. You can't even call it a shambles, as that implies some effort was made.

[Uriel]

A bit more relevant info: Techgage - Creative EAX vs. ASUS DS3D GX 2.0

Looks like there is an audible difference between the X-Fi and Xonar but the Asus card still does a good job.

[dangel]

A bit more relevant info: Techgage - Creative EAX vs. ASUS DS3D GX 2.0

Looks like there is an audible difference between the X-Fi and Xonar but the Asus card still does a good job.

Yeah read that yesterday - they put it so close you'd be hard pressed to notice. Interesting given how long Asus has been in the market..