Really nice article Regeneration, btw im not buying any sound card for now, it will be usefull in future.

for the record ... I do not totally agree with the article
don't ge me wrong, Creative has major work to do and re-write those drivers and apps
offerin a Realetk alternative to X-Fi, well ... it's far feched; I owned SoundBlasters from Live! 5.1 Digital to X-Fi (skipped Audigy 4) and Realtek's solution, even HD one, doesn't "sounds" equal to any of those

you say Creative has to test their products with every motherboard out there ...
I think it's a little bit imposible; because the card was released prior to major chipsets out there, like nVidia's nForce 4 SLI 16x, and that's the moment start of all problems X-Fi has

I'd like to go on but ... tomorrow I must go to work (darn job) and I'm little to exausted

Good job on the article, I really liked the part about the bloated driver.
However, there are a lot of things in your article that needs revising/clarifying and there are lots of other issues that need addressing.

Missing Issues:
one of the things that weren't addressed was proper windows 2000 support.
xp and 2k drivers are essentially the same, but creative labs has a OS version checker built into their drivers to keep win2k customers from using their sound card.

there are unofficial work-arounds, but you have to dig in the forums to find them.
here are the fixes for people who need them.
*no linux driver
*people having problems loading the driver on startup
*"supported hardware not detected"

Needs to be Revised:
*x-fi does have SPDIF, what it doesn't have is DDL.
*the updated snap/crackle/pop info:
http://forums.creative.com/creativel...d=71962&page=1
http://xfi.blogspot.com/2006/08/x-fi...continues.html
http://xfi.blogspot.com/2006/06/soun...kling-and.html
Things that could have been more detailed:
*a description of what each program creative installs, actually does.

Great job guys and I also like the point on bloatware ... always been a problem with creative drivers

A good article and one I hope someone at Creative will pay attention to. What is most vexing is that they are pretty much the only game in town at this point otherwise I'd take my money elsewhere. Even worse, with the upcoming release of Vista OpenAL will pretty much be the only game in town and guess what cards will be the only ones that will support EAX under Vista? *cough* X-Fi series *cough*

Also, one thing I've noticed is going virtually unheard is the VOIP issues that, while not a lot still number quite a few, is being encountered in BF2 and BF2142. The details of which you can see here:

http://forums.creative.com/creativel...=151446#M71967

Essentially after about 2 hours of gameplay VOIP support completely stops with the only solution being to exit the game and restart. This also occurs using either Ventrillo or Teamspeak both within the same period of time.

I'm going to have to argue with you on the "a little bit impossible" standpoint.

If Creative is like any other hardware vendor they WILL have a hardware compatibility lab, in addition to contacts at respective gaming companies, who's job is to check for issues like this. With Creative being pretty much the only business in town I would find it rather hard to believe that they do not have the time or resources to check into these issues and, where they are verified, work on a solution.

In this particular case all we have seen is outright denials from Creative that issues exist in their flagship product or, when they are caught in an outright fabrication, deny that the issue is theirs to begin with and shovel the problem off to someone else. Not once have I seen them take a position where they would do everything possible to help resolve the issue nor even offer any kind of repreive to those who are pretty much stuck at this point with no recourse to return a faulty product.

Bottom line Creative could and should be doing more to address these issues rather than taking the "well 90% of our users do not see this issue" or "well 80% of the users reporting issues have had them addressed" positions that they have gotten comfortable with taking since they know the remaining 10 to 20% are pretty much screwed and they got their money so why should they care?

Reg did an article a bit back on the Realtek EAX issues,.. and they are indeed.. just issues with the software.

the only Codec capable of producing near perfect EAX 2 is AD with its Smartmax and Smartmax HD audio solutions.

I stopped buying any Creative (talk about an oxymoron) products years ago when they first shipped Audolgy series as that was the start of the "driver/services from hell".

You can lead a horse to water but you cannot make it drink!
Creative = waste of time hardware with to many compatability issues IMHO.

For those thinking there is no EAX card alternatives out there, yes there is
Montego
Supports Game Surround Sound APIs such as EAX 1 and 2, A3D, I3DL2 and DirectSound 3D support.

question:
Why only 2 games, at the moment, have issues with X-Fi cards (BF2 and 2142)
the audio interface on those 2 in x-Fi mode is done via OpenAL
OpenAL is used in more than one game: UT2004, Prey, Doom3, Quake4, Red Orchesta ...
why these other games do not exibit issues with X-Fi cards?

could it be that EA/Dice has bad coding in their games? remember patch issues (CTD's, server crashes)

why focus the issue on only one "player" and not take the big picture and analize it?

it's confirmed that X-Fi has major issues with nForce4 chipsets, wich dind't start without problems (remember s-ata controller corupting data)?

I've been going back and forth about this X-Fi Crap since it was released. My bigger problem was the stupid ass "Mode Switcher" and I went to war in the forums and got banned by them. Creative doesn't give a shit and here's the Proof, get ready to laugh.

RMD vs Creative
^^^^^^^^^^

Six months later, they still don't give a ****. (Can we curse in here?)

All processing muscle, and no brain, X-fi Series from Creative.
Taking the Creativity out of Creative!!!

agree 100%
"Mode Switcher" is teh suck.

why is such a thing needed?
I'm not sure if it even does anything besides change the graphics on the creative audio console.
(somebody investigate this please!)

If such a thing is even necessary, why not make application profiles?
like having a automatic profile for powerdvd or something, clicking the mode switcher yourself every time is really ghey.

what is mode switcher? i have a surround mixer with my live 5.1 which allows me to change between 5.1, 4 channel, and 2 channel. and it does indeed effect things.

the windows mixer doesn't work alone and in some cases it can actually be reset back to stero or quadrophonic by the game (which is why i disable the cthelper,.. as that synchonises the windows and creatives surround settings

it actually does work
it changes between normal (entertainment), game (EAX enabled games) and audio creation (low latency ASIO users)

there was an EAX mode switcher even in Live! 5.1 digital card
so, what's the buzz?

yes:P there was, the EAX Control panel allowed us to manually configure eax settings, and the surround mixer allowed us to select from preset EAX, room, and pitch settings (i could make the backstreet boys sound like chipmonks hahahaha... i can't when im using powerdvd's clmei upmixer :P

yes, thats the default creative answer. (without proof of a real life example where it actually does something.)
truthfully, i think the card can perform its functions without using the "mode switcher".

the driver dlls are the same, the only thing I notice changing, are the graphics in the audio console. (if you even have all that junk installed.)

REALLy nice article. It's nice to see that you dig into the problem. I really want to get the xfi but hte probem is a bit scary (not to mention the price).

what's that? why I'm here? to show you that Creative's software does work?
you can try it yourself; I guess it's hard to download Rightmark Audio Analizer and Rightmark 3D Sound and do some test
http://audio.rightmark.org/download.shtml

I guess it's easy for you to toss the card, get a refund or even give it to someone who know how to use it
give it to Squall mate here

I have an X-Fi card, running on Win XP Pro 64bit, and my motherboard is an A8N32-SLI Deluxe. I get crackling in some games, but I found that if you run dxdiag and do the sound tests, you only seem to hear the crackling on the software buffered 22khz sounds (if I remember right). The latest drivers have definately made an improvement; also having the latest beta graphics drivers also helped with tiny pauses on the system every now and again.

The A8N32-Deluxe is almost sharing all the PCI slots. To get rid of it you need to plug your graphics card to the black PCI Express X16 slot, and plug the X-Fi to the PCI slot next to the blue PCI express X16 slot. Doing it will reduce the amount of the crackling by a little bit.

However, since you’re using SLI it may cause problems due to the big size of the 7800GTX's cooler. So you should try to disable some devices in the BIOS (such as LAN #2). In your case – you should remove the X-Fi and use the onboard audio because of the lack of IRQ Sharing support in X-Fi; until you will get another motherboard.

Hi...

With my Asus M2R32-MVP the X-FI does not work fine for me. The sound goes off and in other times a high pitch noise happens in games. I can't understand how works in your test. Please tell me , which is your configuration, I have tried everything, with another X-FI card, disable SATA ATI on board, disable on board sound, upgrading to the 0712 BIOS, trying with both PCI Slots, upgrading to the 2.09.0007 X-FI drivers... and doesn't work. At this moment the X-FI card are puts in the 21 IRQ and not sharing this with another device. I'm desperate, and in the ASUS Forums http://vip.asus.com/forum/topic.aspx...MVP&board_id=1 this happens to more users. Please can you help us? Thanks a lot.

Happy new year to all.

Regards.


My current Settings

ASUS M2R32-MVP
2x1Gb Geil DDRII 800 Mhz 4-4-4-12
2 x Seagate SATAII 320 Gb 16 Mb cache RAID 0
2 x Seagete SATA 160 Gb in JBOD
DVD-RW Nec 3540 x16 ATA 33
DVD-RAM-RW Samsung x18 ATA 33
Sapphire X1950XTX PCI-E X16
AMD 5200+ AM2 CPU
Creative X-FI Xtreme Gamer Fatal1ty

Great Article Regen! Thx. Good Work.

Hopefully CL reads this, maybe they can pick up some of youre tips??

I totally agree with youre ideas on last page, and the CL "drivers" should not be called drivers, they hold more the rank of virus/adware. Worst hardware drivers any hardware has ever known. C´mon CL, fix this now. Hire someone who actually knows how to code drivers!?

Happy New Year, lets hope we get lots of great hardware next year!!

i dont want a XiFi

my SBLIVe does everything i need

runs Openal

and EAX up to 5 (the only difference is the amount of speakers EAX supports :P)

I'll just add in a little twist to the article. I have an nForce2 chipset, I know hanging on to old hardware, and I get the buzzing and popping under heavy disk IO. I'm running an Adaptec 29160 controller with a Maxtor Atlas 15k drive, which isn't sharing an IRQ with the soundcard, so I wonder how that relates to their claims that it's the fault of DDR or an nForce 4 chipset. My SB Live in the same exact PCI slot in this same exact system never gave me grief. If they don't sort it out soon, this card is going back to the store for a refund.

Sortof true for the X-Fi drivers.... but what about a re-write for all the other sound cards they produce? I have a SB Audigy 2 Ext and suffer from the same problems.

Well I used to.. I swapped around PCI slots until I got the soundcard on its own IRG and all is fine now.... the MB is one on the test list as well.

I would have loved to see how soundcards from other companies perform in the tests. What if other soundcards also produce crackling and pops? If you just test Creative models you can never be sure that the problems are only related to those models and thus you cannot conclude that it's Creative's fault. If you test models from more companies and come to the conclusion that only Creative's soundcards have issues, that would be much more convincing than what we have now.

What about new Windows Vista Drivers, do they address any issues ?

Hey Folks

I'm experiencing the same problems. There are many descriptions for "the X-Fi problem", crackling, popping, beeps...whatever, mine is similar, it is that I'm only SOMETIMES able to install the driver (2.09.0007), then it works for 15 seconds, then extreme crackling or a very loud, permanent beep noise occurs, sometime accompanied by system freezes, BSODs IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL... I'm really pi**** of, suppose most of you are

Afterwards rebooting, X-Fi is gone from the hardware control panel and I'm not able to install the driver cause it says "couldn't find appropriate software" (not hardware, it says SOFTWARE!). Result: it doesn't find the X-Fi anymore.

Due to laws here in Germany -which will allow me to get a new card directly from the vendor easily within two weeks after purchase, afterwards it would mean more trouble:

DO YOU THINK THIS IS A *SOFTWARE*-ISSUE or is it due to the X-Fi hardware?

If software-driven I would keep the card and hope for later correction by Creative, Asus, whoever. If hardware-driven, well, that would mean retuuuurn to sender

Make sure to flash your motherboard BIOS to the latest version and try to plug the X-Fi card in another PCI slot.

MY CARD IS FINALLY WORKING - I LOVE THIS GUY!!!!

http://www.media-addicted.de/blog/as...-soundmax/276/

Spread the word!

I had an X-fi Fatality Card that I found out was the cause of my Abit IN9-32X MB refusing to post past bios, same with the asus striker extreme. I RMAd the card and the new one worked and booted past the bios into the os without a hitch. I am guessing I had an old revision of the X-fi card. Funny thing creative told me I was the first to report this problem. I just wish they paid for the S&H charges which I paid. Just wanted to share this with the tech community just incase someone out there is having a similar problem.

Dave.

i know this post is old, but i have that ASUS M2R32-MVP Board and when i use an 8800gt i got IRQ issues, do you guys know any way to solve it??

Read this, though it is German: http://www.media-addicted.de/asus-p5...-soundmax/276/

Excellent article, I have another example where this card and it's amateur SW completely stops - produces high pitched whining tone, and no action short of reboot fixes.

heh, sounds like the Prelude Beta 1 high pitch issue that is effecting us.... of course i already hacked a working driver so meh...