Will creative support EAX using Audigy2 cards in vista?

[GotNoRice]

With EAX support all but gone from Vista, creative seems only worried about making a work around for their X-Fi line. Are they going to do the right thing and support all of their products or are they going to take the easy road and let this stand as an artificial reason to upgrade to their “latest and greatest” card?

 

[alg7_munif]

Or this could be a reason for not to buy anymore product from them . Btw Vista is still new and don't expect all manufacturers to be ready for the new OS espcecially a manufacturer that is well known for their "great" driver support and also Vista is targeted to be used with hardwares for the next fews year, not really designed for hardwares from a few years back. I want to vote but I don't think that it's M$ fault...

 

[Moofasa~]

I believe they will. Just like they added extra headphone effects to the Audigy 2 series right after the X-Fi launched. After ALchemy is a bit more polished, I think they will bundle it with X-Fi/Audigy drivers. Maybe I am just naive .

 

[Audioguy]

I am with you. I htink they will add support aswell. If they don;t they have a very significan't piece of their market share that is very mad at them. It's a large assumption that people will move to X-fi if they don't get support for ALChemy in Vista. They may just toss the A2 or A4 and go with another card altogether. So I think support will be added at a later date

 

[Uncle Jim]

I'd say they will release the version for audigy, that's what they have on their website:

"For the initial beta phase of Creative ALchemy, we made the decision to concentrate on products based on the X-Fi chip. Support for Audigy 2 and 4 class products will be determined as the current beta progresses and we are able to assess the quality of the beta and overall demand for Creative ALchemy."

sure it would be great if they had released ALchemy for both X-Fi and Audigy at Vista launch. But if they had to work on something first, it is no surprise it was X-Fi rather then Audigy.

Vista drivers (last release) for X-Fi work fine, apparently Audigy Vista drivers work fine, too. ALchemy works with X-Fi so the next logical step would be to release ALchemy for Audigy cards

 

[spaceman]

Vista drivers (last release) for X-Fi work fine, apparently Audigy Vista drivers work fine, too. ALchemy works with X-Fi so the next logical step would be to release ALchemy for Audigy cards[/QUOTE]


Say what? I thought Vista drivers didn't work?

 

[Uncle Jim]

Say what? I thought Vista drivers didn't work?

This is beta so I would not be surprised if it was not exactly perfect.
But seems to work fine for the guy that wrote article about gaming in Vista:

"Creative's audio drivers are brand new for Vista, and while we have
had some difficulties with their earliest Vista drivers, the latest are
pretty darn good. One sticking point is EAX hardware acceleration. Vista's
audio stack is dramatically different from the one in Windows XP, and the OS
itself handles most audio processing chores, including EAX functions,
before handing the data off to the sound driver for final audio output.
This will make for a much better experience for those using integrated
audio or other host-based sound solutions, and greater stability for
everyone. But for Creative, which makes the only popular sound card
with hardware audio processing, it's a setback.

Fortunately, OpenAL allows audio cards to bypass nearly the whole audio
stack in Vista and perform all audio operations on the sound card, so
you get your high-performance-hardware 3D sound acceleration. Creative's
little workaround is a program called Alchemy, which will replace the
DirectSound .dll file for specific games with a new one that simply takes all the
function calls and re-maps them to OpenAL commands. Just like that, you
get full 3D sound acceleration in hardware."

source: extremetech

Disclaimer: I do not run Vista, tried first beta and was discouraged to bother any further. I might try it after SP 2 is released. But X-Fi seems to run without problems under Vista now after the new Vista driver came out - the old one was piece of bitch, apparently.