Quote:
Originally Posted by CingKrab /img/forum/go_quote.gif
When you buy out your competitors and make the only remaining standard proprietary, it's not hard to be make the "best" (read: only) gaming sound cards. Now that Asus is on the scene with their EAX 5 capable drivers though, Creative better get its act together, 'cause that's one company they ain't buying out.
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you mean hacked, proprietary drivers that spoof being EAX 5 compatable?
and they bought out Aureal, they didn't buy out VIA, C-Media, Realtek, Cirrus, Yamaha, Onkyo, M-Audio, Hercules, and so on, so you can't really say they bought out the competition, they just bought Aureal (after Aureal went bankrupt due to its own fault, not due to Creative) and integrated A3D into EAX
as far as "only remaining standard", you mean OpenAL, or DirectSound 3D, or DirectSound, or what? oh EAX? you mean the extensions for Direct3D that Creative writes the majority of the specification for, and opened up to various other hardware manufacturers (given that, lets see, VIA and C-Media chips handle it just fine), but other hardware manufacturers are unwilling/incapable of designing more powerful hardware to handle the extra processing required by EAX 3 and beyond (excepting Asus)
and even with the Xonar D2 and D2X on the market, the X-Fi still kicks their teeth in performance wise, because, its got more processing power (owed to being a real processor, and not a hacked up C-Media chip) and onboard memory, along with other "help outs" that its got
and the "purposely screwed drivers for win vista", again, thats not Creative, thats Microsoft (sticking it to Creative) refusing to integrate EAX and other crap into Vista, and refusing to be flexible with its new driver model, Creative, just like the other few hundred independent hardware vendors, have felt this in big ways (Creative is far from the only company to have issues with Vista, and they've actually handled it with workarounds faster, and better than companies such as ATi, nVidia, Ageia, M-Audio, VIA, etc, some of whom still can't claim Windows Vista compatability)
that whole rant aside, I only found this thread looking for info on the Aurvana headphones, which are $30 atm from Creative on a back-to-school promotion, apparently they aren't the best sounding though?