...but will it have drivers which can be described by any term except "dismal," "terrible," or "nauseating?"
I have two Creative cards and let me be the first to say: the company which fields cards which perform as advertised and have good, stable driver support (INCLUDING Open Source) will have my business instantly. The only way to get decent performance out of these things is to use foobar2000 and ASIO or kernel streaming. Every BSOD I have gotten under XP on two different computers has been directly traceable to these cards and their unacceptably unstable drivers.
Oh, and for those of you about to get suckered by the X-Fi "24-bit Crystallizer": foobar2000 can upconvert standard audio to 24bit/96kHz. In software. It takes a bit of processing power, but drastically improves the sound of the Audigy cards, due to the fact that they natively process audio in 48 or 96kHz, not the 44.1kHz of standard CD-quality sound.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Josh Warner @ Mar 25th 2007 1:09AM
...but will it have drivers which can be described by any term except "dismal," "terrible," or "nauseating?"
I have two Creative cards and let me be the first to say: the company which fields cards which perform as advertised and have good, stable driver support (INCLUDING Open Source) will have my business instantly. The only way to get decent performance out of these things is to use foobar2000 and ASIO or kernel streaming. Every BSOD I have gotten under XP on two different computers has been directly traceable to these cards and their unacceptably unstable drivers.
Oh, and for those of you about to get suckered by the X-Fi "24-bit Crystallizer": foobar2000 can upconvert standard audio to 24bit/96kHz. In software. It takes a bit of processing power, but drastically improves the sound of the Audigy cards, due to the fact that they natively process audio in 48 or 96kHz, not the 44.1kHz of standard CD-quality sound.