Quote:
Originally Posted by Arclight
I even "succesfully deploy" 3 cards; X-fi add-in card, onboard Realtek chip, usb souncard that came with the headset. You could get some issues with IRQ sharing, but it should all be possible and this problem didn't occur for me untill I moved to Win7 64-bit, liked stated above.
I have ALC 889A on my board, and I'm pretty sure they don't do hardware acceleration. I definetely can't enable it in games. Remember the X-fi extreme audio? X-fi brand, but no such chip. I think the Realtek chips offer X-fi features through emulation, ie the load still goes to the CPU. 
Goldorak, I agree Creative cards aren't worth it, much like Intel CPUs and Nvidia GPUs. But you're less likely to experience problems with these things, since they're the "standard". And no, EAX is bolocks. Most games don't support it, and the ones that do haven't given me the impression that it really makes much difference. |
Realtek ALC889A's by the way are faster at accelerating audio than CL's X-Fi, so please provide more details than what you provided. Even the 880's where on par with X-Fi back a year or two ago, so I'm not understanding that statement.
EAX BTW makes a dramatic effect with things such as echo's in a hallway, or distance. The question is, does your game support it? Some games do, some games support older rev's like EAX 2.0, and some don't at all. The Thief series, and games like System Shock 2 that rely on sound to raise the hair on the back of your neck and you will know what I am talking about. There are some games that overdid it though. EAX can give you an advatage when playing online FPS games too by helping you judge how far away a shot came.
A fix for you is to load OpenAL since I think DX10 drops hardware acceleration, which is dumb, but we are talking about Microsoft here and they have been known to do dumb things once in a while (Vista.... cough cough..). If it is Vista one is running, they should upgrade to XP and hardware accelerated sound. Windows 7, well, OpenAL is a second best solution. Creative Lab card or not, you will not get any HW acceleration unless you have OpenAL. OpenAL is loaded by default with Creative Labs cards on Vista however (I think). I remember reading that a while back.
There is an advantage to a dedicated card and that is it should have less 'interference' than onboard audio, so if you are a musician, or if you have a really noisey motherboard (ASUS.... cough cough....), then an X-Fi may be for you.
Spoke my 2 cents.
-S