Does EAX actually help you?

[dark_reign]

IMO, EAX works best in a 5.1 or better speaker setup. It's great with the Logitech Z5500s. I notice a difference with it enabled. I recently played through Deus Ex again and enabled EAX via ALchemy (you have to add the game path manually) and it was like playing a different game. There were sounds that I never heard before. More recent games like Fallout 3 also benefit. With that game you can hear the difference when you're walking around and general enviromental sounds.

There are a lot of older games that I originally played on a 2.1 speaker setup, and playing them now with 5.1 and EAX is really sweet. To get the full benefit from the EAX effects you need to have the rear L&R speakers directly behind you or pointing at you from the sides and slightly to to the back of your seating area.

Aureal had a great sound card back in the day. I still have the Monster MX300. I remember people complaining back then that they couldn't tell the difference with that sound card. Those people probably had their speakers sitting on top of their monitor or had them sitting side by side on their desk.

 

[soulesschild]

I'll probably be using a pair of ATH-A900's...so I'm gonna guess the EAX positioning advantage will mean nothing

And I'm guessing there's no nice EAX card that also has a headphone amp like the HT Claro

 

[koopaGG]

EAX does sound amazing in Dirt. JVC HAR-X900 headphones here

 

[redman223]

In older games it made a difference, but in all new games I don't notice a thing. I just tried FEAR 2 out and went through the creative audio console and tried a bunch of different combos. All I can say, is that with a 2.1 set of Klipsch Promedia speakers and a pair of Beyerdynamic DT 770's nothing made FEAR 2 sound any better. I guess Creative's time has passed.

However...in older games using the ALchemy wrapper, there is a world of difference. Its a shame that they did away with directsound in Vista, I don't know or even really care about why OpenAL is better, but on a stereo/headphone setup it does not sound better to me with my X-fi.

 

[Fliddycent]

I have an Auzentech Prelude x-fi jobby and I've never so much as thought of touching EAX. Am I missing anything? The crystalliser's been enough for me.

 

[dark_reign]

In older games it made a difference, but in all new games I don't notice a thing. I just tried FEAR 2 out and went through the creative audio console and tried a bunch of different combos. All I can say, is that with a 2.1 set of Klipsch Promedia speakers and a pair of Beyerdynamic DT 770's nothing made FEAR 2 sound any better. I guess Creative's time has passed.

FEAR 2 doesn't use EAX. It uses XAudio 2, and you can blame that on the Xbox. Some have argued that OpenAL would have been a better choice, and I tend to agree with them.

Right now there's no reason to buy a Creative sound card unless you want full support for EAX and want the sound quality of the X-Fi processor. I'm not sure how well the ASUS Xonar does EAX as I've seen mixed reviews on it.

 

[dark_reign]

I have an Auzentech Prelude x-fi jobby and I've never so much as thought of touching EAX. Am I missing anything? The crystalliser's been enough for me.

If you have some older games that use EAX then install ALchemy. They will either show up in the installed games list or you'll have to add the games and then edit the game path location.

 

[PornoSatan]

Interesting. Split almost perfectly between all options.

 

[dark_reign]

Here's a link to the games list for ALchemy support. Games that aren't listed or are unverified may work:

http://connect.creativelabs.com/alchemy/Lists/Games/AllItems.aspx

 

[boxterduke]

I don't think it helps me playing a game, I'm just happy if I hear things around me in my 5.1 setup. I smile in joy if I hear effects behind me but I also would play just as well with the sound muted.

 

[Ragenrok]

I'll probably be using a pair of ATH-A900's...so I'm gonna guess the EAX positioning advantage will mean nothing

And I'm guessing there's no nice EAX card that also has a headphone amp like the HT Claro

have you checked out the new auzentech forte?

Its the replacment for the prelude and has EAX and a headphone amp built in.

 

[snaggletooth]

...Like that 5-hour energy bs. lol.

Hey that stuff works pretty well. Two little bottles of that before an impromtu night shift and I'm good to go for 8 hours. One at the start, one when the first is wearing off. I mean, it's no replacement for what many would prefer for energy supplement purposes (H+B? ) but as far as legal supplements go, it works well.


EAX sounded great on my Sound Blaster Audigy 2 but like others have said, a quality set of headphones is the ultimate spacial relations advantage in games.

I've since sold the Audigy and I'm using onboard now, s/pdif to 5.1 and a 'cheap' set of Panasonic headphones. Sounds great.

 

[djoye]

I can't say that it helps me do better, hell, I don't even think the games I play use it but when I do play those few games that use EAX it certain sounds better and makes the game funner.

When I went from onboard to an Audigy2 there was a noticeable difference. I think it all matters on how much you pay attention to audio. Some people don't care but I like to listen so I notice these things and choose to use the luxury of EAX or whatever effects are available.

 

[MetalX]

Can't say it helps me perform better but BF2 just isn't BF2 without EAX on an X-Fi.

 

[Vlad_13]

It is not so much EAX as it is CMSS 3D headphone that improves my gaming experience. With both on however I can pinpoint the exact location of someone. So yes, it does help.

Same here, with my MDR-XD400 X-Fi tech coming from Audigy 1 was a night and day difference, especially games with EAX 5. Not to mention BF2 and 2142

And to people who say that they cant spot a difference, you peeps either have an elephant stepped on your ears or you got a crappy 2.0 speakers.








And PLEASE do not compare X-Fi to Audigy1/2 or any other onboard..... it's just stupid
Nuf said.

 

[noobman]

EAX =! quality sound.

I don't know how you deduced that I thought so from my post. When I say that I "miss having a high-quality soundcard" i mean that I miss having access to all of those added features and terrific processing. That is not the same as me saying "EAX makes quality sound". In fact, what I miss the most is CMSS. There's nothing like stereo music virtualized in 5.1... it made everything sound AMAZING.

I must admit that my current onboard does a very good job though (Dolby Heaphones FTW!)

 

[jimmyb]

EAX has nothing to do with sound quality. only accurate sound.

EAX is about unnecessarily offloading DSP onto some custom hardware when it could easily be done in software.

Oh and then charging you a lot for it.

 

[Majinhoju]

i just use the onboard audio on my motherboard which has some basic eax support. and the sound is awesome. granted i've never compared the two side by side.

 

[phide]

And PLEASE do not compare X-Fi to Audigy1/2 or any other onboard..... it's just stupid

It isn't, really. When all's said and done, the Audigy 2 (ZS and greater) and the X-Fi (XtremeMusic/XtremeGamer and greater) are fairly similar. The X-Fi has some better features and extremely minor improvements in its analog output stage, but that's about it.

 

[AmongTheChosenX]

Hey that stuff works pretty well. Two little bottles of that before an impromtu night shift and I'm good to go for 8 hours. One at the start, one when the first is wearing off. I mean, it's no replacement for what many would prefer for energy supplement purposes (H+B? ) but as far as legal supplements go, it works well.


EAX sounded great on my Sound Blaster Audigy 2 but like others have said, a quality set of headphones is the ultimate spacial relations advantage in games.

I've since sold the Audigy and I'm using onboard now, s/pdif to 5.1 and a 'cheap' set of Panasonic headphones. Sounds great.

yeah i went back to onboard to save a PCI slot when i went SLi.

been fine ever since. I use Altec Lansing XA 3051 Speakers

 

[Ragenrok]

Like others have said, its not the EAX I went for, its the CMSS 3D.

My auzentech prelude + my pair of sennheiser HD 555's sound awsome with CMSS 3D, makes me veyr glad I didn't give in to the whole 5.1 headphone gimick.

having EAX is just icing on the cake lol.

 

[christpunchersg]

EAX is useless, it just adds "effects" but it's still MILES behind A3D 2.0. I remember playing at a lan centre once back in 2000 where they had the Monster card from Diamond, A3D was so incredible, with a pair of headphones you can pin point exactly where every sound was coming from.

This is one massive area of PC Gaming that I always thought was way behind. Ever since Creative took over there has been very little to no innovation and improvements made to make EAX anywhere close to what A3D intended to be. A3D took a lot of horsepower to run but it's sheer precision and accuracy was worth it.

 

[Forceman]

EAX is useless, it just adds "effects" but it's still MILES behind A3D 2.0. I remember playing at a lan centre once back in 2000 where they had the Monster card from Diamond, A3D was so incredible, with a pair of headphones you can pin point exactly where every sound was coming from.

This is one massive area of PC Gaming that I always thought was way behind. Ever since Creative took over there has been very little to no innovation and improvements made to make EAX anywhere close to what A3D intended to be. A3D took a lot of horsepower to run but it's sheer precision and accuracy was worth it.

EAX is not intended to be what A3D is - that's why they never tried. A3D was positional audio, which pretty much any sound card can do with reasonable success now, EAX is environmental audio, which makes things sound different in different environments. EAX definately can make a difference in the "feel" of the sound if it is correctly implemented, and the later versions of EAX have improved, but whether it is worth the price of admission is an open question.

 

[phide]

A3D 2.0 is one part multichannel audio API and one part wave tracing engine. Unlike A3D, EAX is based entirely on "rooms": a room is basically any blocked out area which the EAX engine treats as an individual environment. In EAX 3.0 and up, the DSP processes effects for two environments and then blends between the two as the listener moves from one room to another.

In A3D, the engine actually shoots out waves (like rays in a ray tracer) from the listener's point which interact with geometry to generate how the environment sounds. There's no blending from to room to room: it's all calculated continuously and accurately based on the actual level geometry rather than on simple cubic blocks like EAX. The only "effect", reverb, the only effect you really need with wave tracing, gets its parameters based on how the waves bounce.

When you compare A3D 2.0 (or 3.0) and EAX 5.0, the way EAX works is really primitive, especially if you've ever developed a game with it. Some developers just get lazy and use Creative's pre-defined room presets like "room", "hall" and "bathroom" rather than trying to more closely approximate the actual parameters of the rooms. Quake 4, for example, basically just gives you a box where you can select and apply a preset for each room. Really, really basic stuff.

 

[christpunchersg]

A3D 2.0 is one part multichannel audio API and one part wave tracing engine. Unlike A3D, EAX is based entirely on "rooms": a room is basically any blocked out area which the EAX engine treats as an individual environment. In EAX 3.0 and up, the DSP processes effects for two environments and then blends between the two as the listener moves from one room to another.

In A3D, the engine actually shoots out waves (like rays in a ray tracer) from the listener's point which interact with geometry to generate how the environment sounds. There's no blending from to room to room: it's all calculated continuously and accurately based on the actual level geometry rather than on simple cubic blocks like EAX. The only "effect", reverb, the only effect you really need with wave tracing, gets its parameters based on how the waves bounce.

When you compare A3D 2.0 (or 3.0) and EAX 5.0, the way EAX works is really primitive, especially if you've ever developed a game with it. Some developers just get lazy and use Creative's pre-defined room presets like "room", "hall" and "bathroom" rather than trying to more closely approximate the actual parameters of the rooms. Quake 4, for example, basically just gives you a box where you can select and apply a preset for each room. Really, really basic stuff.

Yes, I remember reading about this all this before. Why Creative never chose to fully exploit the powers of A3D's engine? We may never know. But I suspect that since they have no real competition on a grand scale, they'll never have to put out more than they need to. Save the money on R&D and keep revising EAX instead of totally re-vamping it from the ground up.

If I were to compare A3D to EAX, it would be like, in HL1 back when A3D was supported, I could pinpoint the grunt talking behind a wall in a room, where as in EAX I can only approximate where he is. You can imagine in a full fledge gun fight in a FPS game, how much engrossing A3D was. Who knows, maybe years down the line EAX will evolve to that level but for the last 9 years it still hasn't.

 

[christpunchersg]

EAX is not intended to be what A3D is - that's why they never tried. A3D was positional audio, which pretty much any sound card can do with reasonable success now, EAX is environmental audio, which makes things sound different in different environments. EAX definately can make a difference in the "feel" of the sound if it is correctly implemented, and the later versions of EAX have improved, but whether it is worth the price of admission is an open question.

I'm not saying EAX is completely useless. For your average game like CoD it did its job but I have always found very minimal gains between using EAX vs not using it.

 

[Drudenhaus]

Can't say it helps me perform better but BF2 just isn't BF2 without EAX on an X-Fi.

Having logged over 450 hours in BF2 (admittedly, I stopped playing quite some time ago), this is the reason I voted hell yes. For many games, I can't tell though.

 

[mastrdrver]

I tried switching to my onboard sound for playing through WaW sp. I was amazed at how bad a job it did! I had it setup for 5.1 surround with my Logitech setup and I would only get sound out of the left, right, and center. I even tried it in mp and could never tell hear people coming in from behind me or anything. Even though the onboard says it supports 5.1, it treated my speakers like 2.1.

When I switched back to my Audigy, wow what a difference! I could now hear people walking around and could locate direction of sound sources in mp. It's not that the Creative card did it better, it's just that the onboard just never did it. It felt like what you would hear in real life (with locating direction of sounds).

Sorry for those who like onboard, but for me there is just no difference. Also, this was not limited to WaW, but also COD4, Crysis demo, and even Burnout sounds better.

 

[christpunchersg]

Onboard sound = onboard graphics. If you like to listen to hissing and EMI then go right ahead but even a cheap 50 dollar audigy will improve a lot on onboard sound.

 

[MetalX]

^ using analog output

 

[christpunchersg]

Well yes if you're all you're gonna do is use optical out to a receiver/DAC then the onboard sound will do just fine.

 

[criccio]

Which is funny because I can't believe how many threads I see where people go on and on about the $$$ gaming soundcards they bought and then proceed to say they are using the digital out...

Talk about a facepalm.

 

[MetalX]

Heh yeah, that's why I wanted to clarify for lurkers hoping to learn something from this thread. I see the mistake mentioned above quiet often.

 

[Gorankar]

Heh yeah, that's why I wanted to clarify for lurkers hoping to learn something from this thread. I see the mistake mentioned above quiet often.

Yeah, anymore the only reason to get an Xfie for modern games, (less than 2 years), is the better analog output, (when compared to on board solutions), and maybe CMSS 3d for headphones. EAX is just not as widely used anymore as it was pre Vista. And the hardware offloading done by Creative cards is just not as important as it once was with so many people sporting 2.5Ghz and faster, dual and quad cores.


But if you are still playing a lot of games from 2-5 years ago with EAX support, under Xp32, EAX can definitely increase the immersion factor of your sound in many games from back then.

 

[soulesschild]

Yeah, anymore the only reason to get an Xfie for modern games, (less than 2 years), is the better analog output, (when compared to on board solutions), and maybe CMSS 3d for headphones. EAX is just not as widely used anymore as it was pre Vista. And the hardware offloading done by Creative cards is just not as important as it once was with so many people sporting 2.5Ghz and faster, dual and quad cores.


But if you are still playing a lot of games from 2-5 years ago with EAX support, under Xp32, EAX can definitely increase the immersion factor of your sound in many games from back then.

I wouldn't say old games, some of the newer games have EAX 5.0.

I'm probably gonna settle on a Auzentech Forte. I don't watch blu ray movies and stuff so the Auzentech HomeTheater HD that's supposed to come out isn't much of a concern for me. It's also cheaper than the X-Fi's but offers much better sound quality and a headphone amp

 

[sparks]

when creative stole A3D they were taken to court.
Of course pay 15M to settle or buy the co.
They bought the co...
Creative is more or less using A3D kinda how you look at it.

Anyone who thinks pc onboard or auzentech give positional are lets just say not caring about games.

Let me clarify one thing auzentech....WITHOUT the creative chips that is.

 

[phobic]

A few years ago I would've cared but now? Nope. I use onboard audio now for the simple fact that I don't want or need 5.1 speakers in my computer room. I used to be a "hardcore" PC gamer but I rarely play PC games these days (mostly because I hate sitting at a desk like I do all day at work). All my music and video files are accessible from anywhere on the net thanks to my Windows Home Server and I access most of it in my living room which DOES have a 5.1 audio system among other things.

Plus Creative pissed me off years ago with their sub par support so I don't want to give them any more money.

 

[phide]

Yes, I remember reading about this all this before. Why Creative never chose to fully exploit the powers of A3D's engine? We may never know.

I assume it's because Creative doesn't really have any interest in making a major investment in that kind of technology. The foundation's there, and they own all of A3D's tech, but I'd imagine they don't want to have to spend resources trying to transition developers into something brand new. It's probably much more cost effective to just make incremental upgrades to EAX and pump the majority of company resources into (often shady) marketing. Probably they figure that works out better for them in the long run, especially since there's no real competition where they're situated right now.

So, we keep buying new Sound Blasters because they're marketed in such a way as to make them seem more impressive than the previous generation, so we keep upgrading. It's a pretty good system for Creative, I think, but it's obviously pretty shitty for us.

 

[sparks]

have to agree.
here is your sound card.
Would you like to purchase some drivers to make it work?

Some of the S#$%^ of Creative is beyond stupid...
of course I can say that for microshaft, buzzard and almost anything in the market. F them for every damn nickel and then tell them how good it feels.

 

[HammerAZ]

Intel® Desktop Board DX38BT - Intel® High Definition Audio subsystem

I have some 5+ yr old yamaha 2.1 speakers.

The GF and I play side by side, so when we turn it up - we cant hear eachother. (Doesnt help that I'm half deaf from too much *boom boom* in HS)