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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
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.
I feel bad for Creative, they are pretty much the one and only sound card manufacturer (yes I know there are others but they are the most popular IMO). But is there really a demand for a bigger and better sound card from the average consumer?. How often are you in the middle of playing [insert game name here] and found yourself saying "man, I need a sound card upgrade, I'm just not getting the performance i need!!". In addition, when was the last time you thought of water cooling your sound card?.
My point is merely that sound cards provide great sound, but if your not in the Music industry, all the cards sound pretty much the same.
...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.
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
they'd put in a USB or PCMCIA form factor for use in my laptop...
MobileOptimized
Porting Linux to a soundcard? I've never heard of such a thing. Sounds excessive, but I'll hear you out.
Paul Grosfield - the quicker picker upper.
. . . why does Creative still refuse to include an optical out on its sound cards?
Yes you can get the live drive, but on a media PC that's designed to be on show, it makes sense to have the digital outputs out the back, where they can be easily concealed.
HiteC do one, as do turtle beach, why not Creative?
Creative says that the X-Fi's upsampling and upmixing capabilities can make MP3s sound better than the original CD.
In other news, Creative have created a new image compression standard that makes compressed images "look better than the original uncompressed version". A Creative spokesperson has announced that this compression standard uses the same technology as X-Fi to create information out of thin air.
Seriously, there is no way to make a recording that is compressed by a lossy algorithm such as MP3 sound as good as the original without creating information out of thin air. Of course, X-Fi can't do this, so it must be "guessing" what the original information was. This would of course mean that what you are listening to is just a moderately close approximation of the original recording that has had information added to it to sound "better" (by some Creative engineer's definition of "better").
-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.
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.
From the The Official Gravis Ultrasound Programmer's Encyclopedia:
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 on their hands...
That line about MP3s sounding better at 96kHz is a bunch of marketing BS.
There are reasons for 24bit/96kHz, but upsampling just to play it out of a speaker isn't one of them. That's kind of like printing out something at 2400dpi only to scan it back in again at 300. At best, you're going to wind up with exactly the same thing, while at worst you're going to have a bunch of aliasing artifacts from the upsampling.
Upsampling for playback is worthless even if your source material is perfect CD audio. Taking something even worse than that (MP3) and upsampling it is just turd polishing.
Want better sound? Buy better speakers. And a sound card that has high-quality analog components. The digitial part is not the weak part of computer sound playback. Hard to market that, though: "Now with 10db more S/N! And better capacitors!"
24bit/96kHz is good for doing high quality recordings, then manipulating the sound and mixing it. Once that's done there's no point in distributing it in anything better than 16/44.1, if all that's ever done with it after that is playback. If you want your listeners to be able to do their own remixes, that may be another story, but then you have to distribute separate mixer tracks anyway...
314-15-9265
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.
For all intensive porpoises your a bunch of rediculous loosers
I think the moderator missed this announced card by Creative: Silent Card The SNR is way better.
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
... and moderaters are stupid who bother at all, and don't use "overrated" and "underrated" ... because you don't m2 over & unders.
/. is broken to hell and back.
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
Why do I M2 everything negatively?
How can make an mp3 sound BETTER than the CD?
Add bass. It *will* sell.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
That image technology has been around forever. Just watch an episode of CSI.
I was going to make much the same observation and then something occured to me:
Quality of sound is subjective.
It's why every crappy CD player and walkman comes with a Bass Boost. Boosting the bass doesn't make the sound more authentic than the original but, for the average listener with no idea what clear music should sound like, more bass is appealing and a selling gimmick.
Similarly, you upsample, apply smoothing algorithms, apply fractal algorithms, whatever, you may be able to give a perception of clarity, of spacial separation, etc. far in excess of what the original CD had. That doesn't mean it's what the artist and engineers intended, it doesn't mean it's more accurate to the original performance, but you'll still get the average 13 year old telling you that Britney's latest masterpiece sounds even better now.
So, you can make a track sound "better" to an average sampling of listeners without it being more accurate to the environment of the original recording. It's all about their definition of better.
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.
That's like saying you can make JPEG look better than the uncompressed image. Yes, you can improve the quality of MP3 by careful interpretation of data and perhaps extrapolating information for higher frequencies (which most often suffer from MP3 compression -- MP3Pro does something similar), but it will NEVER be as crisp and clear as the original material, let alone better.
Not that you'll be able to hear the difference on your $20 desktop speakers you got at the 'Shack anyway.
No encryption can withstand the power of the Lucky Guess.
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.
News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters? Like hell.
... 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?
There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.
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.
Arguing about vi versus Emacs is like arguing whether it's better to make fire by rubbing sticks or banging rocks.
Basically all pro cards from the low end up are designed to do one thing only: get audio in and out of the computer accurately. You pay for more ins and outs, better converters, etc, but all they do is play and record sound.
The Creative cards from the Live on up are all DSPs. They are designed to convolute sound. So in a game if they want it to sound like you are in a parking garage, they give the proper commands to the card and it convolutes the sound to do it's best appromation of a parking garage. This leads to both lower CPU usage and more realistic sound than doing the processing all on the CPU.
So the problem is, because of this consumer focus, sacrafices were made. One was that the Lives and Audigys output (and input) only one sample rate: 48kHz (Audigy 2s have 96kHz, but only in special cases). They'll accept any you like under that, but sample rate convert that. They do an ok job, but not great, distortion is introduced that you can see on a scope and hear on good equipment. So they are right out for good recording. Also, they kinda chepskated on the converters for the cards, so they are noisy, compared to others in their price range.
But, for all that, they are real, no-shit, DSPs. If you get the OSS kX drivers (http://kxproject.lugosoft.com/index.php?skip=1) you can actually write your own assembly programs for the DSP and control what it does.
Now the X-Fi is extremely exciting as it fixes most of the problems people had. For one it has three different modes it can be set in. In pro mode it dispenses with all teh resampling crap and does accurate 1:1 bit capture at any sample rate up to 96kHz. In other modes where it does resample, it does it with a kickass high-order filter that introduces essentially no distortion.
I am unsure if it has the ability to function as a VST plugin built in, but certinaly nothing precludes it from doing so. It's a powerful DSP and has the capability to route sound in and out of it.
So, really, it's not comparable to pro cards. They are designed to do different things mostly. There are some pro cards that feature DSPs, but very few. These days in pro work, the effect processing is done in software. It's more flexable and real time is non-critical. However in a game, you can't dump 20% of your CPU in to doing a single high-quality reverb, so having a DSP is a real boon.
Personally, I use both. I have an M-Audio Firewire 410 for pro, an Audigy 2 for consumer. I imagine that'll become an X-fi very soon here.
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?
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.
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.