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Creative X-FI Series and hardware acceleration

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1000

Limp Gawd
Joined
Oct 2, 2005
Messages
426
Hi there all.

I have a Creative X-FI model (cheapy one) that I'm told does not do any hardware acceleration ("extreme audio" I think), also have the ASUS ROG III motherboard that came with a small PCI-E sound card that I'm told also doesn't do any hardware processing.

I was left wondering, what's the cheapest Creative X-FI sound card that does hardware acceleration, taking the sound processing away from the duties of the CPU ? There are so many models I can' tell one from another any more. I'm not that fussy, I just want a decent soundcard that handles hardware acceleration.

1000
 
Bleh, hardware sound processing is overrated. CPU's are so fast these days there's less than a 1% difference in performance between hardware sound and cpu, and it's not always in favor of the hardware solution. Not sure if older games that use EAX require hardware acceleration on the card itself or if it's just driver/vendor dependent. You can always pick up an xtreme gamer on the buy/sell/trade forum here that does hardware sound, 50ish dollars.
 
If you're using Vista/7 and your model of X-fi supports OpenAL or ALchemy (I think they all do) then that's how you get hardware acceleration. If you're using Vista/7 and a game uses OpenAL for sound then you're good to go except you might want to get the latest OpenAL drivers; if a game uses DirectSound and you want the game to utilize the sound card then you'll need to use the ALchemy app to support the game. This requires configuring some settings in the ALchemy program, many of those settings you can find in that link.

In order to get proper 7.1 sound from Source engine games (HL2 Episodes, TF2, L4D, L4D2, Portal) I had to add them to ALchemy and then type "snd_legacy_surround 1" into the console to get all speakers working properly.
 
The xtreme audio card isn't a real x-fi, it's just a rebranded Audigy SE (which wasn't a "real" audigy either). It does all its sound processing in software, the card has zero support for hardware accelerated sound. I don't think alchemy requires hardware support, it's just a go-between for older EAX titles and OpenAL, which is done in software on the xtreme audio and hardware(??) on X-fi equipped cards. I could be wrong about that though, somehow I think you only get hardware sound if the title specifically supports the xfi card.
 
I believe that the lowest end X-fi cards that actually decode in hardware are the Xtrememusic and Xtremegamer.

Anyways, I'm pretty sure it is the reason I bought the Xtrememusic in the first place :cool:.
 
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