Discussion
I've just upgraded to an X-Fi and think it's fantastic.
I'm not sure how much better it is than an Audigy though. I upgraded from a Philips Acoustic Edge which was quite long in the tooth. I had tried the onboard RealTek 7.1 Audio on my motherboards but never thought much of them, plus they used to slow my PC down in games more than the Edge. The X-Fi sounds great (especially in games that support EAX HD) and from the benchmarks i've seen gives up less fps in nearly all circumstances than any of the competition.
From what i've read don't bother with the more expensive models with the X-RAM as only about three games utilise it and it makes little or no difference to the performance of those games (i've just got the XtremeMusic)...that is of corse assuming you want the card for gaming
Also the final thing which clinched it for me was the Vista wrapper Creative are comming up with. Under Vista there is no hardware sound accelleration for DirectSound. ALL soundcards will just run software audio renderers. Creative have a wrapper that currently only supports X-Fi (although Audigy 2/4 support is a future possibility) that recodes all DirectSound to OpenAL and thus makes use of the X-Fi's hardware.
I'm not sure how much better it is than an Audigy though. I upgraded from a Philips Acoustic Edge which was quite long in the tooth. I had tried the onboard RealTek 7.1 Audio on my motherboards but never thought much of them, plus they used to slow my PC down in games more than the Edge. The X-Fi sounds great (especially in games that support EAX HD) and from the benchmarks i've seen gives up less fps in nearly all circumstances than any of the competition.
From what i've read don't bother with the more expensive models with the X-RAM as only about three games utilise it and it makes little or no difference to the performance of those games (i've just got the XtremeMusic)...that is of corse assuming you want the card for gaming
Also the final thing which clinched it for me was the Vista wrapper Creative are comming up with. Under Vista there is no hardware sound accelleration for DirectSound. ALL soundcards will just run software audio renderers. Creative have a wrapper that currently only supports X-Fi (although Audigy 2/4 support is a future possibility) that recodes all DirectSound to OpenAL and thus makes use of the X-Fi's hardware.
Edited by mr_yogi on Sunday 4th February 21:11
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