Predictions for the near Fut

Question

So I'm at work and I'm bored. That being said, here are my thoughts on what will transpire with Creative and Drivers/Software/Hardware over the next several weeks and months. NOTE--no official timelines or news here, just pure bored speculation.?) Stable (WHQL) and optimized drivers WILL appear for both X-Fi and Audigy, but we won't see them until May or even June. Let's face it--the March drivers are a stopgap measure that work for a lot of people, and to expect another major driver release within 3 months of the previous one is optimistic, but not likely IMHO. And frankly, optimized drivers likely won't appear until Fall. 2) The software suite we all know and love will also appear for both X-Fi and Audigy, again probably May/June. UPax has already demonstrated that this can be successfuly ported to Vista, so it must be in the works. 3) Alchemy will be ported to Audigy after leaving BETA. This application has proven to be very successful for every EAX game I've tried it on, and I've seen similar success stories for the majority of other users. I can't imagine that they wouldn't port something so successful to Audigy as well. 4) Dolby/DTS Decoding -- I'm uncertain on this one. Maybe they'll come up with a software solution, but I don't foresee them spending the time and resources to get the hardware decoding to work. 5) The next gen cards will not have hardware acceleration, instead depending on capabilites of modern processors to take the work load. This is how the other guys are currently doing it, and with the problems Creative is having getting their hardware based solutions to work, it's a good bet they'll move to the software model.

Answer 1

I think that the software will come after working drivers come out for the Audigy and X-Fi. Whenever that is, is anyone's guess, but I think that they can get it done in May or so. They could already have had it done, but what's done (or not done, in this case), is done (or not). I also think Alchemy will come to the Audigy, regardless of whether Creative does it or not. The Wine project for Linux has to translate DirectSound calls into something, and they may write a Dsound to OpenAL wrapper at some point, something that is possibly useful on Windows. It wouldn't surprise me if a few enterprising programmers waiting to reap the rewards of advertisement money are working on a Dsound to OpenAL wrapper right now. Third party programmers doing this before Creative is bad for Creative. Creative needs to hurry up and do this, or at least give us a loose timetable. The lack of information is terrible. I think many Audigy users could more patiently wait for better drivers if they could at least use EAX effects. Not doing this is making many of them refuse to buy Creative products. I am one of them. I will not buy anything from Creative until Creative brings forth Alchemy for the Audigy. I don't care how well third party drivers and wrappers work--it's Creative's card, and their responsibility to ensure it works. I think the future sound cards might properly make use of Vista's driver model. If I understand it correctly, you are supposed to write your drivers in such a way that Vista sees the DSP as a seperate piece of hardware from the rest of the card. Vista can then make use of it in its driver model to do hardware audio. I don't think this will mean EAX support, but hardware audio takes some of the load off the CPU, a bonus, I'd say.