Replacing Audigy 4 for vista

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Flak Pyro

Gawd
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Sep 9, 2003
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Hi all, i currently have a Audigy 4 running on XP 32bit working great im ready to make the jump to vista 64, i have another 2GB of ram on order to bring me to 4GB of ram total, so im looking for a sound card that works well with vista, i have heard all the horror stories of older creative cards and vista as well as 4GB of ram issues and id rather not even deal with it.

So i am looking for suggestions, i do a bit of gaming but im not worried about the small hit ill take by not having a creative card for gaming.

I have been looking at the Asus Xonar and HT Omega Striker so far, so any opinions would be great, thanks :)
 
I found the Titanium X-Fi card to be pretty stable on Vista x64 and no issues with 4GB of RAM.

Although I have seen a number of nforce 790i users have trouble with the card, so if that is what you've got, you may want to hold off on that particular card.
 
Right now im leaning towards the HT Omega Striker 7.1 it is supposed to have very good driver support and EAX really means nothing in Vista land correct? It can do OpenAL no problem from what Ive been reading too and that is more what counts these days...i think? :)

No Nvidia chipset here Intel 975x, just really dont want to deal with Creatives bloatware drivers
 
I've got an X-Fi Titanium in Vista 64 and it works fine. EAX and hardware processing works through ALchemy which is driver or something the is loaded in Vista.
 
EAX is a set of extra audio instructions that can be done over DirectSound3D or OpenAL. OpenAL is fully functional under Vista (Bioshock, Battlefield 2 / 2142, Jedi Knight, a bunch of other games.)

DirectSound3D isn't. ALchemy lets you use DirectSound3D games in hardware on Vista, and if the game also has EAX then you'll get that back too.

The whole 'Vista killed EAX' thing is a common misconception. Vista killed DirectSound3D; specifically, Microsoft prevents DirectSound3D from having direct access to hardware (which was the point of the original API, thus the 'Direct' from the title.)

Vista still allows third party audio APIs (OpenAL) to have direct hardware access, so games that use DirectSound3D have to be converted to OpenAL to be fully functional.

There are two significant downsides to not using something like ALchemy or the Xonar's solution: Directsound3D was used to specify the audio positioning of sounds in multi-speaker setups. Without DirectSound3D having access to hardware in Vista these games are limited to stereo sound. Unless you use ALchemy or one of the Xonars.

The other downside is loss of EAX. Which you also get back with ALchemy, and to a lesser extent with the Xonar (which does EAX emulation.)

OpenAL games are fully supported in hardware on Vista.

There are other games that use software-only audio rendering, and under Vista these will be unaffected; these software audio engines (Miles Sound System is a popular one) can do surround sound audio positioning and reverb effects, and I've seen them allow up to 128 voices (although 128 voices puts a strain on my CPU, 96 is a bit more reasonable.)

If you game a decent amount I'd steer you towards an X-Fi card (Creative Titanium or Auzentech Prelude) or one of the Xonar cards, which have all gotten good reviews. The xonar does its audio processing in software, but has openal support and an emulated EAX that lets you hear more than you'd hear with other options.
 
well im really stumped, im not too interested in any Xfi card due to the driver bloat, but does the HT Omega even support OpenAL in hardware? From what ive found it doesnt which isnt too good. Im starting to look at the Asus cards, how are the drivers? Bloated or pretty lean?
 
Flak Pyro said:
well im really stumped, im not too interested in any Xfi card due to the driver bloat, but does the HT Omega even support OpenAL in hardware? From what ive found it doesnt which isnt too good. Im starting to look at the Asus cards, how are the drivers? Bloated or pretty lean?
Click to expand...

the auzentech x-fi prelude is always an option. all the benefits of x-fi with relatively lean drivers. costs about the same as the asus xonar, and sounds just as good.
 
Oh that is interesting, i thought the prelude had the same bloated drivers the Xfis used its good to know AuzenTech trimmed some of the fat
 
also since my last post i have read a few reviews of the asus card which looks good, the drivers look like are pretty lean too, would you recommended the D2 or the D2X? They are both priced around the same only difference being PCI-E. There is also the cheaper DX model.
 
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