For me the new driver fixed issues I was having with the SBX Surround. Before this update (as you might have seen me complain of earlier in this thread) the placement of audio was awful... moreover, there was a constant, what sounded like, phasing issue going on.
For those that aren't familiar with audio recording or wave-forms and how they interact (I'm guessing most people on here do... but just in case): Phasing is the location of the peak portion in a wave form related to a copy of the wave (or substantially similar form of the wave) and the affect, be it cancellation or amplification, of that sound wave... In layman's terms, phase cancellation (the principle behind noise cancellation headphones) occurs when a wave form is flipped 180 degrees and played over the original wave form. I.E. the upper crest of one wave (think of it as a number or similar to electricity, lets call it +120) is added to the lower crest of the other wave (this would be the exact opposite in the case of flipping a wave 180 degrees, or -120). 120-120=0 in this case, the wave form would completely cancel out (on paper... in practice it is tough to get them to line up perfectly, even with software).... or, if you stacked both waves without inverting 180 degrees (120 + 120 = 240) you would effectively double the perceived audio volume of the wave (or 3db increase) - you can witness this in any DAW.
Anyways... you can experience this in life by singing in a shower... As you sing a note, the waves produced bounce of the shower walls and come back at you, depending on the wave length (different notes being sung have different wave lengths, and different harmonic waves lengths). Some wavelengths will line up perfectly with each other and boost the volume of some notes you sing, while other wavelengths may be close to perfectly inverted and reduce the volume of those notes. As an experiment, try starting from one note and incrementally sing higher and higher pitch notes (or lower and lower notes) and listen to which get amplified and which seem quieter and harder to hear. You may find one bass note that seems to rattle the walls (my shower boosts the pitch of a D2 I am able to sing... barely... and what would normally be very hard to hear, as it is the second to lowest note I can physically hit, instead gets amplified and fills the bathroom with such a pleasant bass that could about rattle a toothbrush off the counter... okay maybe not quite... but still)
Okay... So... Now that all of that has been said, what the G5 previously sounded like when running SBX 3D Surround was akin to phase cancellation on a larger scale. It basically made ambient sounds in games such as a wind, water, and others sound awful (basically anything that gets played from the far sides of both ears, as the SBX algorithm creates the illusion of a room by digitally reflecting some sounds from the right side of your ear phones and delay playing them in the left side - this relates to how your mind handles audio, micro delays, and calculates the distance and location based on the slight differences... I believe I wrote another post on how this works if you are interested).
The sounds of ambient noises were generally off, sounding sort of like they were being played under water (an effect of phase cancellation at multiple frequencies) which really ruined the 3D effect for me. As such, since I bought the G5 I have been using it along side Soundblaster's old X-Fi MB3 software based AAX... Which lowered my maximum bit rate to 48,000 Hz, but in general sounded far better than the constant phase cancellation of the G5's built in SBX 3D Surround...
Anyways, the point of this post was to mention the latest update to .15 cured my phase cancellation problems, and the built in surround now sounds substantially better than it did, moreover, sounds better and has better placement than both the X-Fi MB3 had and the X7 had (back when I was testing it, newer updates may have improved the surround in that as well, but it was relatively comparable with the X-Fi MB3 at the time, probably mostly due to the 5.1 channel limitation)
This said, it could have been a coincidence... Perhaps previously the drivers were corrupted in my installs, perhaps the latest update finally fixed this corruption... though I had installed two other updates previously without the issues being fixed...
Other than this, I am not sure what else has changed in the latest driver update... I certainly wish they would post some release notes when they release new drivers/firmware... you know, like ANY OTHER COMPANY... just saying.
