Play Doom 3, and Quake 4 with EAX 4 HD enabled, play Battlefield 2, and Unreal Tournament 3. You'll find it's implemented very well. Sadly EAX implementation is on a sharp decline since ~2007, for obvious reasons. Microsoft doesn't want realism in sound, it doesn't want the PC audio hardware industry to advance.
Agreed - add to that list FEAR, FEAR 2, Thief: Deadly Shadows (or any of the Thief series) . . .
when EAX is developed alongside the game itself, it adds a level of polish that just isn't capable when you slap EAX support on after-the-fact.
Anyone remembers Aureal?
Now A3D was the shit, until Creative killed them off by taking them to court and having more money than their smaller "competitor".
These days no-one really makes anything all that great, but that seems to be in general in the market, just copy someone else and call it something new and off you go...
Aureal started that whole mess, claiming that Creative were using technology that they owned . . .
After the ensuing battles (which Aureal couldn't afford to pay out for), Creative simply purchase and acquired Aureal (includeing A3D). A3D, in Creative's hands, laid the foundation for EAX 1.0 and subsequently EAX 2.0. Everything beyond that point has been solely Creative's development.
I can only hope creative fails in the future or stops making sound cards and take on a role like ati or creative but in the sound card market because 1: Creative sucks at making drivers and 2: Creative sucks at making consistent good quality sound cards(Dacs, etc) and rely too heavily on their CA20KX chipset, which is why if you compare an HTOMEGA to even the X-Fi Titanium, the HT sounds better in music, X-Fi only compares if you enable both crystalyzer and CMSS3D and the surround is still not as good even with that, not to mention they love making people waste money, remember the CA0106 fiasco when creative was ripping people off but still said "oh its X-Fi" and it was a straight up lie, creative specializes in gouging people for money, thats it.
This is the blatantly ignorant type of opinion that drives me insane (no offense towards you Kain) . . .
For starters, Creative makes decent quality sound cards - you have to remember, considering how vast their market is, it wouldn't benefit them to use uber-high quality PCB components. Can you imagine how expensive their mainstream cards would be if they used the best DACs, ADCs and OPAMPs available? It's not like ASUS or Auzen who can do such, because their market segment is so small.
Comparitively, look at the difference in price between an Elite Pro, and the Fatal1ty cards . . . that's near a $100-$150 price difference . . . and the major difference between the cards themself is the PCB components. The EP uses much higher quality DACs, OPAMPs MOSFETs, VRMs, etc.
So, they sacrfice a little quality to keep prices competitive - besides, the average user wouldn't notice the differences is actual quality anyhow; most users don't even have the equipment to hear the difference.
Secondly - the APU/DSP arguement has no difference on actual sound quality . . . that only determines how much of a work load the card can handle . . . what
does make a difference is the DACs, OPAMPs, capcitors, VRMs and other various PCB components that directly affect the output channels, the filtering and amplification.
Comparitively, the music playback can also be limited to the actual compression codec itself . . . for example, a poor-quality .mp3 would sound better with lower quality PCB components, than the same track would sound with higher quality PCB components. The higher quality card would make the shortcomings of the compression much more prevailant . . . hence, why the other manufacturers target their cards at the audiphile and enthusiast segments . . . the users who prefer to run higher quality entertainment . . . not this ipod tripe.
Where the X-Fis pull ahead, though, is in sheer performance . . . they can easily handle excessive workloads without breaking a sweat, and are fast as hell at processing, too . . . hence why the majority of the X-Fi lineup are targeted at gamers . . .
As to surround implimentation . . . after hearing the soultions from a few other companies, nothing compares to CMSS-3D (sadly). Creative's audio positioning implimentation is superb . . . and again, the reason why is due to how many software voices the X-Fi APU can support . . . well over 60k, whereas the C-Media chipsets can't even touch half of that number. The more software voices available, the better the final processing and positioning will be.
Graphics have nothing to do with sound. One would think that upgrading from onboard to an EAX capble sound card would bring you a little more than poorly implemented echos.
EAX is far more than just poorly implimented echoes . . . again, I stress the fact that in games where audio is poorly developed - that is how it comes across (hence the poor opinion most users have of EAX) . . .
If you play a game where the audio has been developed properly, EAX adds ten-fold to the immersion levels, and it doesn't come across like a bunch of "echo" effects. But, the problem being, game developers overlook audio, or are too effin lazy to properly impliment it.
Take, for example again, FEAR/2 . . . environments "sound" much closer to how you would expect them to . . . compared to Doom3 where EAX 4.0 was patched in after the fact - where many rooms just don't sound right.
