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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."
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.
You're thinking of the Aureal Vortex (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A3D). 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.
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?