EAX/X-fi support

[Commander Keen]

Hello All

First of all thanks very much everyone @frontier. Words cannot describe how much im looking forward ED :smilie: .
Could someone please tell me whether ED will support my x-fi titanium please? Maybe thats a silly question but im not really tech savvy and im worried that it wont be supported as its quite old card i know. The thing im interested in is whether ED will process audio in hardware through this card or whether its gonna do cpu software audio only (hope someone knows what i mean) . I was always getting slightly (slightly) better framerate when game fully supported my x-fi. Obviously my CPU isnt great thats why im interested in this (g3420)


Thanks so much for help


Have a great day everyone !



ps: eng is not my native language hopefully the above makes at least some sense

 

[Donik]

I have the xfi titanium hd, it's working perfectly fine with elite.

 

[Memnoch]

I have an X-Fi card too but one of the other gamer editions. I can't say whether it is using any of its enchanced features but it sure does sound purdy in 7.1 surround.

I feel that plugin cards are kind of out of favour at the moment with many sticking with onboard sound. I'm a bit old school (read very) and have always bought Creative. Have we got to the point where that is not necessary perhaps?

 

[Donik]

Have we got to the point where that is not necessary perhaps?

Try your onboard sound and see for yourself
I'll never use my onboard sound with headphones as long as i have any kind of dedicated sound card available.

I had a cheap Asus xonar before I got my titanium hd and even that was leaps better than my realtek onboard..

 

[atomic7431]

I have an Asus Xonar DGX and its way better than my onboard chip on the Gigabyte Z87X-OC, much more details in things like glass breaking or bullets whizzing past my head
The other best thing i did to complement it was use the heaphone jack with built in amp and bought myself a pair of sennheiser HD518s very very good headset.

ps. i use the drivers from HERE which are also better than the asus ones.

 

[Pyros]

After decade long usage of plugin audio cards (all from creative), I used onboard audio (realtek whatever) for some time with a creative headset. It was just fine...

... until I put a Soundblaster Z and a Sennheiser headset (PC360). Then I truly realized how crappy the onboard audio is.

Anyway, I don't think ED uses the EAX library for audio effects.

 

[Asp Explorer]

I haven't used a plugin sound card since the Live in 98 or so, and Thief

I'm not sure EAX is even used any more, isn't it all combined into Direct sound these days? There's OpenAL too for legacy stuff.

 

[Shigawire]

Not to rain on your parade or anything.. but you are selling yourself (and the rest of us) short by requesting something as inferior as 7.1 surround and EAX. Creative labs hasn't improved the technology of digital audio for gaming, on the contrary they've been restraining progress for at least a decade.

I've requested Binaural Audio, and audio can't get any better than that.

http://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php?t=13480

 

[Im_Lost]

I don't think people really bother with EAX any more? Creative has been lagging behind for a long time now. Why bother with a creative card when you could have an Asus Xonar, which are better and about the same price

 

[iconoclysm]

Shigawire's spot on, Creative has done more to limit the progress of sound in gaming than even microsoft did when they killed directsound3d in Vista.

Oh how I long for the days when behemoths like Aureal and Gravis bestrode the land.

I weep for the loss of my Vortex 2 card.

 

[CaptainKremmen]

Recently, I moved from my old AMD X64 PC setup to an updated build (Win 8.1). I started out using the onboard sound, which worked 100% trouble-free.

I then disabled onboard sound, and brought across my older X-Fi Xtreme card.

Nothing but trouble! Driver trouble, mode-switching bugs, software issues galore. The Creative support boards were full of people fighting the same issues.

After 24 hours, I gave up and went back to onboard. That old Creative card is now headed for e-waste recycling.

K.

 

[Pyros]

Recently, I moved from my old AMD X64 PC setup to an updated build (Win 8.1). I started out using the onboard sound, which worked 100% trouble-free.

I then disabled onboard sound, and brought across my older X-Fi Xtreme card.

Nothing but trouble! Driver trouble, mode-switching bugs, software issues galore. The Creative support boards were full of people fighting the same issues.

After 24 hours, I gave up and went back to onboard. That old Creative card is now headed for e-waste recycling.

K.

Well, creative drivers (were the worst in the world) and the lack of decent PCie card were the reason I went onboard for quite sometime.

With the Soundblaster Z all issues were solved. And, according to the comparisons and reviews I read when I bought it, it was superior to the equivalently priced Asus Xonar cards.

 

[Im_Lost]

Recently, I moved from my old AMD X64 PC setup to an updated build (Win 8.1). I started out using the onboard sound, which worked 100% trouble-free.

I then disabled onboard sound, and brought across my older X-Fi Xtreme card.

Nothing but trouble! Driver trouble, mode-switching bugs, software issues galore. The Creative support boards were full of people fighting the same issues.

After 24 hours, I gave up and went back to onboard. That old Creative card is now headed for e-waste recycling.

K.

Yep, some of the X-fi models had/have problems with poor quality construction that results all kinds of problems which are un-fixable (including sound cracking under some frequencies, not good). The buggy drivers don't help either. It's why I got rid of mine.

Creative tried to sweep it under the carpet but their forum is full of complaints.

 

[Dejay]

Not to rain on your parade or anything.. but you are selling yourself (and the rest of us) short by requesting something as inferior as 7.1 surround and EAX. Creative labs hasn't improved the technology of digital audio for gaming, on the contrary they've been restraining progress for at least a decade.

I've requested Binaural Audio, and audio can't get any better than that.

http://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php?t=13480

The short version is that for headphones (for example with VR like the oculus rift) you won't get any "out of plane" sound sources with 7.1. You are mixing audio into 7 channels and then downmix them again into virtual surround sound. You'll never hear space ships that are above or below you.

Binaural audio decoding can do that, for example OpenAL-Soft and hopefully the audio engine Elite Dangerous uses (Wwise). But it's not entirely clear if they in fact support binaural audio mixing or if that is more of an interactive sound authoring engine that simply plays out through DirectSound.

In any case, you should be aware that all you theoretically need for the perfect 3D sound is good stereo headphones and a good sound engine (direct sound isn't). Anything with 7.1 is sub par.

EDIT: Forgot I have access to the old alpha build now I'll have to try out if you can pick up top and bottom audio cues.

 

[Commander Keen]

Thank you guys !

Thanks very very much for all replies guys. Yesterday i finally found some time to test it. i put my old x-fi titanium into my pc again and launched Elite alpha 1 (im beta premium only) .

First of all i can honestly say that the sound quality improved so much you wouldnt believe. Mobo is hm81m with some realtek. Amp is very old technics su-v2x. speakers also vintage tannoy stratford.
ELITE SOUNDS AMAZING with this old setup. much much better than with onboard audio.

But the main thing is that i can see HUGE and i repeat HUGE fps increase. I know that many people wont believe this but in case of my cpu (g3420) x-fi helped a LOT.

For example last scenario with many ships:

onboard: 21.8 min, 27.8 max, 24.5 avg 99%cpu usage
x-fi: 22.7 min, 36 max, 33 avg 94%cpu usage

That 8 fps makes the game much more playable for me.


Thank you all and have a great weekend

 

[smsKONG]

Got one of the first gen xifi cards here, and although it's a pita with drivers being the worst they've ever been - performance and quality is far superior with the external card over on board.

True it sometimes takes 3 or 4 reboots of my computer just for it to be able to find the drivers for the card but hey, it's all good

Ps it's not like I move the drivers round in between uses; how come it can never find them!?

 

[Donik]

Ps it's not like I move the drivers round in between uses; how come it can never find them!?

If you've got a different PCI slot you can try, switch it and see what happens. I had to move my card from the top slot down to the bottom and then everything started working beautifully. I use the top slot for the Wireless AC card now, instead. Just a little flip-flop.

 

[smsKONG]

If you've got a different PCI slot you can try, switch it and see what happens. I had to move my card from the top slot down to the bottom and then everything started working beautifully. I use the top slot for the Wireless AC card now, instead. Just a little flip-flop.

I would have given this a go but the size of my gfx card cooler and tight clearance on the mobo means I lose 2 pci slots, so swapping round for irq conflicts isn't an option unfortunately