Windows 7 accelerated vs onboard audio

[ellover009]

Hey guys I am currently running windows xp and I used to dual boot to vista, I have an older x-fi platinum regular pci and it got moved to my newer system when I built my newer i7 system. I was not impressed on the whole mess of windows vista and the x-fi requiring a glide-wrapper to get the eax working on games.

My friend was telling me that I might be better off using my onboard audio than using the old x-fi, His reasoning was that the integrated audio off my asus p6tdeluxe ADI® AD2000B 8 -Channel High Definition Audio CODEC is pretty excellent and that it would reduce lag from driving the southbridge controller on the motherboard because regular pci is already obsolete and that I would not see any gains on windows 7 64 bit.
It all come down to that if I was gonna use a digital output then maybe I could benefit on stand alone accelerated sound card.

So what do you guys think? is accelerated audio still a mess like it was on vista?

Factors to know
currently on xp, used to dual boot to vista (didn't love it) Planning to move to Windows 7 64bit.
Asus P6T Deluxe 1366 socket
x-fi platinum regular pci.
Cambridge soundworks 7.1 system (I got it off work for free at work, was too large for bosses desk, he bought the 2.1 system and swapped out 2 speakers, so 2 of speakers on this are smaller.
Audio Technica A900ltd's headset.

 

[samadams]

Identical sound API.

 

[DeathFromBelow]

So what do you guys think? is accelerated audio still a mess like it was on vista?

What's so messy about it? You install Creative Alchemy and let it enable EAX in your games. Done. EAX is still hardware accelerated, Vista/7 just require Alchemy to translate the old Directsound calls into OpenAL.

EAX is obsolete. Creative now wants game developers to use OpenAL's EFX interface.

My friend was telling me that I might be better off using my onboard audio than using the old x-fi, His reasoning was that the integrated audio off my asus p6tdeluxe ADI® AD2000B 8 -Channel High Definition Audio CODEC is pretty excellent and that it would reduce lag from driving the southbridge controller on the motherboard because regular pci is already obsolete and that I would not see any gains on windows 7 64 bit.

Like I said, hardware accelerated audio works fine. You probably wont hear much/any discernible quality difference with music/movies, but it won't hurt anything to use the X-fi card. You might as well drop it in for the EAX capabilities.

It all come down to that if I was gonna use a digital output then maybe I could benefit on stand alone accelerated sound card.

With digital out there shouldn't be any real quality difference between onboard and the X-Fi, they just pass the data on to the receiver. The only difference is that the X-Fi supports EAX and such.

 

[wadec22]

using win7 64 with x-fi platinum pci. i can tell you my onboard is garbage in comparison. i haven't had a creative driver problem yet on win7. if a guy is going to use a toslink to an outside dac like a preamp or receiver, no difference. if you are using digital output to speakers, the output from your pci card will sound better.

 

[Forceman]

Most (all?) new games don't use EAX anyway, so the Alchemy is really only an issue for older games. Unless you are doing digital out to a receiver, you'll get better quality and performance (albeit slight) from the Creative card. Just roll with it.