Creative's X-Fi Audio Chip Reviewed

theraindog writes "The Tech Report has posted an in-depth review of Creative's new X-Fi audio processor. The 51-million transistor chip employs a unique audio ring architecture that pushes an apparent 10,000 MIPS, supports up to 128 hardware-accelerated voices for 3D audio, and can upsample and upmix stereo 16-bit/44.1kHz audio to multichannel 24-bit/96kHz. Creative says that the X-Fi's upsampling and upmixing capabilities can make MP3s sound better than the original CD, and although that claim isn't validated by listening tests, the X-Fi does sound better than other consumer-level audio cards. It also performs better in games, in part because precious few sound cards feature hardware acceleration for 3D audio."

Why are there no other contenders?

[PhrostyMcByte]

Soundstorm gave us a bit of hope but noone knows if that'll ever come back. I'm sure many gamers would just love to keep Creative bloat out of their system.

Linux Drivers?

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone know if/when we'll get drivers? Checking google, the ALSA developers don't seem too optimistic about getting specs etc. from Creative. :(

It can sound "better" than a CD

[dada21]

A few years ago I listened to a PC app that was destined for hardware that was ahead of its time.

It upconverted/upsampled, analyzed the headroom and expanded/compressed as needed, analyzed the noise floor and reduced it, analyzed the spectrum and EQ'd it, analyzed the stereo separation and expanded it.

After 9x the WAV (or was it VOC?) length, it sounded "better" 99% of the time.

They never got funding and the project died.

With powerful hardware, you'll definitely get a more aurally pleasant and more dynamic sound.

But is it what the artist intended?

Gits :(

[eggz128]

Those fuckers killed Aureal. Creative has been on my shit list ever since...

Compared to Pro-Audio cards?

[Anonymous Coward]

So how does this compare to other sound cards? I've been told by others into pro-audio that the Audigy was an expensive over-hyped POS and sounds really bad compared to pro cards.

So how does this compare to low end prosumer cards like M-Audio and Emu? Or higher end more professional cards from RME, Apogee, Lynx Audio? Or is this really pointless? If there is DSP accelleration on this new card, I was wondering if it could have pro applications like VST reverb or something along those lines.

Gravis Ultrasound

[no_such_user]

WRT making audio sound better than the specs of the original file, the Gravis Ultrasound [wikipedia.org] cards claimed a similar feature. IIRC, they claimed to interpolate new samples between those fed into the card from, say, a .wav file. This card was from an era before MP3's were ubiquitous.

From the The Official Gravis Ultrasound Programmer's Encyclopedia [gamedev.net]:

... it will interpolate the data to give an effective 44khz (or less, depending on how many active voices) sample. This means that an 8khz sample will sound better on the GUS than most other cards, since the GUS will play it at 44khz!

I don't know if this was ever proven to be effective. Some people said that interpolation made lesser quality files sound "smoother". These same folks might also have had a lot of ink [snopes.com] on their hands...

Re:Compared to Pro-Audio cards?

[LibertineR]

Well you were lied to. I've got the Audigy 4 Pro, which was short lived because of X-Fi, but it carries the same high-end DACs that the top X-Fi board has. I drive a set of Klipsch 5.1 Pro speakers with it and it sounds so good, I now drive the optical output from my DirecTivo in my office into the breakout box, where the Dolby surround signal is decoded by the sound card. If there is a better sounding board than the Audigy 4, I dont need it, cause the thing sounds great. Oddly enough, I waited a year to buy this card because Creative's drivers have a reputation for suckage. I was using a Turtle Beach 5.1 card before, and there is no comparison.

Re:Creative Bloat

[EzInKy]

  You're right that Creative's Windows drivers are bloated, unstable and downright nasty. But the open-source emu10k1 drivers for Linux are actually quite good, and I've found that with a little tinkering, I can get my Audigy2 sounding better in Linux/ALSA than I can in Windows/DirectX. The best part? Zero bloat, and the drivers just work with no extra crazy software required. I just want to hear sound for goodness sake, not run friggin' Creative OS. I wonder if this new card will also have open-source drivers?


I'm with you with Creative cards on Linux...they just work and work pretty well. As far as the poor Windows users go why does Creative feel they have to punish them so? I thought the idea was to sell cards, not piss people off.

Re:Creative Left Out

[Guspaz]

You're thinking of the Aureal Vortex (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A3D [wikipedia.org]). A3D simulated a low-detail version of the 3D environment and calculated reverb based on the reflections inside that environment.

A3D died off years ago, and Aureal was bought out by Creative. EAX still can't come close to A3D's capabilities.

For an idea of the A3D generation, Quake 3 supported A3D for 3D audio, though it was later removed when A3D died off.

Fucking Shitragging Bastards

[leathered]

I think my subject line is more appropropriate than yours.

If there's one hardware firm I despise over any other then it's Craptive for that very reason. Aureal had some superb tech waiting to be unleashed. A3D 2 was superb and was easily a 10 frag head start in Q3 and HL, you could hear exactly where your enemy was and where they were coming from. A3D 3 was going to be even better until Craptive decided to bury Aureal in litigation. Then the vultures bought what was left of them and A3D lies in their vaults while they palm off their inferior reverb engine that is EAX.

I still take out my Vortex 2 card and cradle it thinking of what could have been. Now I can only dream of Creative going under and someone like Nvidia and the ex-Aureal engineers they employed for SoundStorm finally bringing us true positional 3D audio.

I don't care how good their latest chip is, creative can fucking rot in hell for all I care.

Re:It's FUNNY, not insightful.

[Tink2000]

... and moderaters are stupid who bother at all, and don't use "overrated" and "underrated" ... because you don't m2 over & unders.

Go ahead, waste your mod points on me: I'm trashing this account down from excellent karma to nothing so I can restart.

Oh, and I m2 everything negative as well. The moderation system on /. is broken to hell and back.

MP3s sounding better & more

[click2005]

While many might believe this is marketting BS, has anybody actually compared them? As someone has already mentioned, the Gravis Ultrasound could improve audio (I owned one).

A review on Toms Hardware http://www.tomshardware.com/consumer/20050818/inde x.html [tomshardware.com] also says MP3s sound better.

The card will also support multiple 3D positioned audio sources in real time.

While the card is excessive for most users, the card is still very impressive.

a-fucking-men

[Doktor Memory]

I am, to this day, probably more bitter about Aureal's end than about any other failed tech company other than the one I was personally involved with. (Don't ask, you've never heard of them.) I still have my MX300 in a drawer, on the off chance that someone with a soul gets an internship at Creative and leaks the driver source so that it can be updated for XP and Linux 2.6. And I will neverever buy a Creative product in my life: it's almost five years later and they still haven't managed to come up with a positional audio codec half as good as the one languishing in their vaults...

And dear lord am I ever enjoying watching Apple stomp Creative into bloody chunks in the DAP market. Couldn't happen to a nicer pack of thieves.

I lost interest...

[xigxag]

... when I got to the part about Creative not using Dolby Digital Live because it's not DRM'ed enough. These guys were taking DRM seriously even before Microsoft made it a priority. Doesn't that make them Officially Evil?

Even more heinous, they killed Ensoniq and EMU

[ArghBlarg]

... two of the best pro synth makers on the market. It's disgusting that a low-end POS (and I don't mean "point of sale") soundcard company could take over two high-end synthesizer houses, leaders in the sampler/workstation market, and cannibalize their incredible chipsets for *home PC sound cards*. What a waste.

Imagine if all the bands in the late 80s and 90s had to compose their music on a SB16. That's how shitty 'Creative' has been for the music biz as far as I'm concerned. Bleah.

sigh....

[MonoSynth]

MIPS - said before, Meaningless.

24bit/96KHz - Lots of crap has been made with this label. Please tell me something about the DACs they use. I'd rather have a good (professional) 16bit/44.1KHz board than a consumer-level 24bit/96KHz one.

'better than CD quality' - how? why? The only way to do this is by interpolating. How does it know if something is an MP3 artifact or if it's part of the music? How will it react to music that's encoded with OGG or AAC (and therefore has other compression characteristics)? Will this be 'better' like applying an unsharp-mask over a JPEG-compressed image which results in ugly squares?

Re:It's FUNNY, not insightful.

[Tink2000]

Then how come in five years of faithful daily m2 I've never once m2'd an over or under? Hm?

I understand the m2 system well enough to know that I get one frickin time to get m2'd adversely and never again get mod points. To me, /. is an entertaining newsite with a game: get excellent karma and regular mod points. Well, I got the excellent karma but never ever ever the mod points after someone couldn't figure out why I thought something was funny.

I love how you say these things and don't bother to back them up in any way. If I "clearly don't" then please enlighten me, oh wise AC. I'm dying to know.

Re:Creative Left Out

[DeadScreenSky]

nVidia probably backed off SoundStorm because of either implicit or obvious threats from Creative.

My understanding is that Creative actually (surprise surprise) owns some of the patents or even software used inside the Soundstorm. In particular they bought Sensaura, which provided the software for the Soundstorm's DSP. Apparently they then jacked up the prices so it didn't make sense for nVidia to continue with it (especially since it unfortunately never took off on the PCs - though obviously it did well on the Xbox).

(Though apparently there are credible rumors now that the PS3 may feature some form of next-gen Soundstorm.)

Re:Creative Left Out

[duffahtolla]

from here [hardwarecentral.com]

With A3D, a physical model of the environment must be constructed just as with normal visual 3D models in the application. This allows for accurate 3D sounds as the sounds are essentially "rendered" in the environment according to acoustic physics. Hence, reflections off walls that are closer will sound different than reflections that occur further away. EAX, on the other hand, only simulates the effects of environments using real-time effects such as reverberations.

A3D required you to actually construct a 3D model so that the reverb, sound occlusions, etc were actually calculated for that environment. If there was a column between you and the sound source, it would be muted as in the real world. If you were just inside the mouth of a tunnel, your footsteps would reverb but someone yelling at you from outside the tunnel would not reverb since the sound traveled directly to you and not from wall reflections. Neat stuff.

With EAX, Walking into a tunnel would cause an abrupt change in sound qualities, (adding reverb, etc) at the threshold of a tunnel, because the programmer would mark that area as needing reverb. This has been masked over with newer EAX versions, (3.0 by merging the two regions, smoothing over the change) but the system is still only doing what the programmer thinks it should at that spot. Hold a watch to your ear while in the tunnel and the ticking would have reverb even though it shouldn't. There is no accurate 3D rendering of environmental sounds.

To use a visual metaphore, A3D was like Quake 3 and EAX is like Wolfenstein-3D.

EAX 4.0 is like Wolfenstein-3D with photorealistic textures.

Re:Creative Left Out

[jandrese]

Heh, I have an SB Live Value I bought ages ago when I was a poor college student and built-in sound cost extra and was even crappier on motherboards. Thus far I have felt no need to upgrade. My motherboard now has 6.2 sound and optical out and all sorts of stuff that my (equally old) speakers can't handle. But the SB Live supports 8 channels in hardware compared to the 1 my regular card supports. It's no secret why I still use it.