what sound card to get ?

[Robscix]

Originally Posted by b1lk1

Sorry, there is nothing creative ever build or thought of that can hold a candle to the Xonar. EAX is over-rated and even creative cards have to emulate it in Vista since Vista does not allow it to function so you are still offloading the work to the CPU to get EAX in Vista.

That is not quite correct. In Vista, the Direct Sound HAL is gone. Without this, in older games which use direct sound the audio rountines cannot "talk" to the audio card and have it change effect parameters based on the game.

In comes ALchemy, This wraps the Directsound calls to OpenAL calls.

The "Game" cards can Hardware accelerate EAX effects using the OpenAL API under Vista. OpenAL works as it always has and is not affected one bit by Vista. The gaming effects produced under Vista are not emulated. EAX effects are emulated on the Xonars though and tax the CPU.

OpenAL games still have full hardware acceleration and older DS games are wrapped using ALchemy and so they are also hardware accelerated. Everything works as it should and users did not lose hardward acceleration that is a common mis-conception. The only thing "missing" is the DS HAL, nothing more.

[b1lk1]

I stand corrected by the only person I would consider the expert on this!

(But the Xonar still rules, LOL!)

[CraigHf]

Originally Posted by Jim

ended up spending another 35 bucks and ordered this Creative Labs Sound Blaster X-FI Titanium FATAL1TY PCI-E 1X 24BIT Sound Card 7.1 Optical IN/OUT - DirectCanada
xonar looks good though,dc didnt have at the time i ordered ,from what i could tell this doesn't have the vista & eax issues of older creative stuff ,hope its as good as all the reviews say it is

I personally own this card, and am very happy with it ...

[Squeetard]

There are lots of reviews out there comparing the xonar to the x-fi. The results are pretty much the same. Very close, with the x-fi getting the edge in gaming and the xonar with an edge in audio quality, The differences are minimal though, machine measured.

No openal support on the xonar though, not good.