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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."
Ah, good old MIPS. I always love this number. The first thing they tell you in computer architecture classes is, "This is the MIPS value. People used to use it, but it's very much a bullshit number."
Missing link?- x-fi/index.x?pg=1
http://techreport.com/reviews/2005q4/soundblaster
...But this guy sounds a lot better, regardless.
OK, actually, it sounds a lot better when it's connected to a Home Theater receiver/amplifier. Whatever. It's a far better way to spend your $100.
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-AT
Working in a DevOps shop is like playing in a band made up entirely of keytarists.
Exactly. The statement might be revised to "Precious few sound cards feature full hardware acceleration for 3D audio", since some cards like the SB Live! do 3D acceleration, just not on enough 3D channels to cover it all in hardware.
This used to be a big issue in games where 3D (surround) sound was used. These days with faster processors, it isn't such a big issue any more. In fact, many modern games (Half-Life 2's Source engine, and DooM 3) both do all sound processing exclusively in software (though Creative later blackmailed Id into adding hardware support for DooM 3). It was decided for this current generation of games that CPUs were fast enough to do the sound processing in hardware, and that it was the best way to provide a consistent presentation no matter what sound card is used. Both games do all their 3D mixing, and their post-processing (reverb for example) entirely in software.
Does doing it in hardware still provide a CPU benefit? Yes. Is it that important anymore? No, unless you're going nuts for framerates.
I seem to recall a benchmark done years ago on an Athlon 1.4 that showed 40% CPU usage exclusively for 3D sound on the SB-Live, and something like 5% on the Audigy. Now, with current high-end CPUs at something like 3x faster than that, spending 15% of a game's CPU budget on sound is fine. Multithreading in games (to support multicore processors) will further reduce this, since you'll be able to offload sound processing to the second core.
They bought E-MU who was a synth manufacturer, and started releasing some very high quality stuff under the E-MU brand. I point to the 1820M which has unbelivable specs which have all been verified by independant tests. This sound card is a low end *MASTERING* grade unit for about 550$.
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The _usage_ of the "MIPS" here might be mostly marketing bullshit (as it doesnt make the sound "better"), its not compareable to PMPO or co.
Its just a bit decieving, because getting mips in audio chips is _REALLY_ easy. You are mostly dealing with 16 or 24bit integer values, in neat streams. You can build a whole function unit for a few 1000 transistors...
So just give the thing 50 adders, 50 mul-units, runn it at 100 Mhz and you get 10 billion possible instruction per second (which might be burned quite quickly if you want to do bigger effects on xx streams, but thats another matter).
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
Right.
So fair competition in your eyes involves malicious litigation knowing that the legal burden will drive your much smaller competititor under?
The only real audio card maker to have the balls to stand up to Creative was Diamond (remember them?). All the others wouldn't touch Aureal's tech while there was question marks over the legitimacy of Creative's claims which meant Aureal lost even more money. Later the courts would throw out every one of Creative's claims but by then it was too late.
The real injustice was the fact that Creative after losing the court case was allowed to pick over the remains of Aureal and acquire their IP. There is something seriously wrong with capitalism when companies are allowed to do this. Whatever the outcome, Creative was going to end up the winner while you, I and Aureal were most definitely the losers.
For all intensive porpoises your a bunch of rediculous loosers
I always had bad experiences with stable machines becoming unstable after installing Creative's drivers, and never liked that you can't seem to just install what seems like a driver but have to screw up your system with what seems more like an application suite / (buggy) driver combo. What's worse is that despite the bloat Creative's stuff never has the features that I actually want in a sound card.
The only salvation for my SB cards has been the 'kx project' drivers:
http://kxproject.lugosoft.com/index.php?skip=1
(sorry I don't know to enter a URL here...)
If you are a musician these drivers have the features you actually want; WDM, ASIO, GSIF - other than the sound floor (on my SBLive) they make the card competative with a mid level music card. No bloat and I've found the driver to be solid, though the UI is rather yucky.
As a former long-time Creative customer who has been burned many times and have seen many others burned, I'm no longer interested in Creative products. What I am interested in is this:
t goddl/
http://www.hidiaudio.com/products/mystique.html
http://www.bluegears.com/soundcard_xmystique.html
That's right, a card that can perform real-time Dolby Digital AC3 encoding (aka Dolby Digital Live, or DDL). The spiritual successor to the nVidia Soundstorm!
Turtle Beach has a card with the same chip, although their driver support is a bit lacking in comparison:
http://turtlebeach.com/site/products/soundcards/m
And this is the chip that drives them both:
http://cmedia.com.tw/product/CMI8768_plus.htm
The cards are pretty affordable - newegg has them both for under $100. Personally I'd rather go with the X-Mystique due to better driver support and on-board coax output (even though both cards come with optical cables, IIRC).
I guess Terratec has an Aureon 7.1 card that has DDL as well, but they don't market their cards to the U.S.
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In the context of digital signal processing MIPS refers to the number of multiply-accumulate operations per second, including incrementing buffer pointers. It is a well-defined number and comparing it is not meaningless even across different architectures.
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