Tally up another Creative endorser!
I really wish Creative would come out and educate their potential customers. I think they are hesitant to reach out because of the possible backlash from those silly reviewers and supposed enthusiast gamers that keep repeating the same crap over and over until enough new gamers believe it. When not for ignorance, then for spite.
For years now I keep hearing the same regurgitated nonsense about how great gaming audio quality is with onboard sound and there's no reason to buy audio cards anymore. Yet more regurg I see quite often is the claim certain Xonar cards are equal to, or better than, Creative cards, for gaming. Guess what? I have partial hearing loss in one ear and half deaf in the other.....yet even I can notice immediately the difference between onboard quality vs the real thing. I don't care if the onboard chip is from Creative IT WILL NOT BE AS GOOD AS THE REAL THING, PERIOD. Maybe one day that will change, but not today and not tomorrrow either.
I've been gaming on PCs for over thirty years and trust me, I've tried nearly every combination out there at one time or another. The real truth is most casual gamers don't even know how to adjust settings or the proper way to install/update drivers. Many of your favorite enthusiastic forum members are just that...enthused, and not well versed in all things PC. It has to be a seemless experience for them of plugging in the card, clicking on the driver install and not much else beyond that. Anyone familiar with hardware and software beyond assembly and user interface understands that it's not always so simple. Settings must be adjusted according to the intended use both in-game and through Creative software. Different games require different adjustments, same as graphics/visual quality. Maybe if some of these gamers spent even half as much time fiddling with audio quality as they do overclocking their GPU and adjusting image quality then they might change their tune. But they must be educated first.
If not for the SB Live! (and console commands, muhuhuhaha) I'd never have been much good at competing in say, Quake, TFC, CS on any of the big clan servers. Just plugging in the card and installing the drivers was a MAJOR improvement back then, but not good enough. Those seeking out methods to gain advantage found the console to be useful for increasing footstep sounds even further and disabling other sounds. What did help were console commands which allowed for this type of adjustment to be made in-game and were not known to most gamers then, and still aren't today. You see, at competitive levels of gaming every advantage counts. Hearing footsteps alone isn't good enough if you can't tell from what direction they come from. And here is where Creative comes in to play. They are practically spoon-feeding this ability to gamers today with very little adjustments necessary other than game-specific settings. It's all on the game developers at this point to add these features in.
You don't need to be an audiophile or hardware guru to enjoy these advantages. You simply need to read, read, and read some more. Try to understand audio technology in the way you think you understand PC hardware in general.
Don't go hog wild on a gaming build, spending two weeks getting your CPU overclock 'stable', another week on the GPU overclock, and then no time at all spent on the audio end other than installing the driver, plugging in the cans and hoping for the best.
lol?
you wont know how good it really is till you try it.
