Xonar DGX vs higher end cards - Page 2

only difference between the Xonar DG and DGX  electrically  is the PCI  bridge chip and of course the connection .

it was cheaper to do  that than desighn a whole new pcie card . Sound cards in that price range are an endangered species 

with on board solutions getting better.  

Quote:

Originally Posted by livngston 

Thanks.  I am on the fence.  I am considering purchasing either the Beyerdynamic DT770 Pro (80 ohm) or the new Beyerdynamic Custom One (16 ohm).  The new Beyers would not even require a headphone amp, and I know the DT770 will need one, but the 80 ohm model should be fine with even the DGX amp.  

 

As most of my music is in MP3 format (from Amazon) I doubt they have many encoded at 192 Khz.  I predominately will use the card for gaming over music.  So I am really curious if the Essence or TiHD offer any advantages in virtualization.  I understand EAX is emulated in Windows 7, so not sure if the TiHD offers any advantage there?  

It still does, for the games that use it. Let me clarify a few things:

-The new Vista/Windows 7/Windows 8 sound stack removed DirectSound3D support. Most older games that used EAX did so through DS3D. It is NOT emulated in any way; your DS3D games are reduced to stereo, maybe even mono, with no reverb/chorus/occlusion/etc. effects.

-OpenAL remains unaffected. This is why ALchemy, DS3DGX, 3DSoundBack, etc. can even work in the first place: they wrap the old DS3D calls to OAL, thus restoring hardware sound acceleration and EAX. Obviously, you don't need to use it on games that are OpenAL-native to begin with (Battlefield 2 being a great example).

-Only the X-Fi DSP handles EAX 3/4/5 natively due to Creative refusing to license them out like they did with EAX 1/2.

-Asus claims to emulate the higher versions with DS3DGX, but I remain unsure how well it holds up to the real deal in terms of compatibility and quality.

-For that matter, Creative's own software OpenAL renderer that claims to support up to EAX 5, used with the X-Fi MB(2) software packages, USB "X-Fi" devices, Recon3D cards, and probably their upcoming Z-series cards too, has issues that even the hardware X-Fi OpenAL renderer doesn't. Not just EAX 5, but even basic EAX 1/2-era games.

-EAX aside, the way DirectSound3D and OpenAL work allows CMSS-3D Headphone to create a proper 3D binaural mix. Dolby Headphone is incapable of leveraging this extra positional data, instead downmixing it to 5.1/7.1 before it does its work. Needless to say, this gives CMSS-3D Headphone a substantial imaging advantage. Kind of like having an aural wallhack, as I say all the time.

For gaming, I'd still advise going with the X-Fi Titanium HD, if you can afford it...unless you really want that FiiO E9-class amp on the Essence STX and you only play games that use XAudio2 + X3DAudio and FMOD Ex (for which the X-Fi DSP brings no benefit because it's not being used by the game engine).

Quote:

Originally Posted by PurpleAngel 

Check Asus's Phoebus website, nothing on auto sensing for the Phoebus.

Late reply but I'm posting because I have just got my Phoebus. I didn't reply before as I wasn't sure where I had read that the card has auto-sensing. Anyway, got my card and I can confirm that when you plug in headphones audio is automatically switched from the speakers to the headphones, and when unplugged audio is switched back to the speakers. You can manually select the output in the control panel too.

cool, thanks for that - didn't know about those drivers

yeah, he is correct, the only difference is one little PLX chip on the board, nothing else changes between the DG and DGX