Creative Responds to lack of Vista support

[NamesDontMatter]

Creative has responded to the Inquirer reguarding their article on Creatives Lack of vista support. Story can be seen here. The creative PR responded "We have been working on the Vista project for quite some time, having released beta drivers late last year for the beta community and endeavored to keep our customers up to date regularly via our Vista update site and forum feedback."

For those who wish to have a timeline for the release of more polished creative drivers here are a few dates to look for. March 5th, and March 8th. On March 5th Creative targets delivery of the Audigy series drivers, this is suprising to many seeing that the X-Fi series is newer than the Audigy Series and is being released at a later date.



In continuation of what the Creative PR said to The Inquirer, "The changes to the audio implementation and subsystem were quite major, requiring a fundamental rewrite of the driver model and features to take account of the lack of direct hardware support" and continued saying, "Additionally, removingDirectX 3DAudio hardware support required a work-around, in the form of Creative Alchemy, which was available before Vista hit the retail shelves to restoremulti-channel EAX audio." ( 'Alchemy'for those who do not know is a middle-ware solution to Microsoft's troublesome removal of direct hardware support in DirectX.)Creative also said that the current changes in Microsoft WHQL proceedures have also been time consuming.

View at TechPowerUp Main Site

 

[EastCoasthandle]

This is getting juicy

 

[wazzledoozle]

The Audigy beta drivers work fine for me. If final is an improvement, good on Creative. (For once...)

 

[killatia]

if creative can get there drivers out then i might get vista. i can get the home premium upgrade for $89 at my college.

 

[DaJMasta]

Whine whine whine.

I'm sorry, creative seems to use "it's a lot of work" as an excuse all too often.

I mean that was their official reason for not using PCI-E on their newer cards too....




I own one because it's standard, and the drivers for x64 XP work well, but I think we all put up with a little too much crap from them..... just because they're the default.

 

[INSTG8R]

While I have only owned one Non-Creative Card(Turtle Beach)
All my Creative cards have had great sound WHEN they worked, but as always from Creative BAD SOFTWARE. In fact I spent almost 6hrs on Sat redoing both mine and my wifes machines snd cards(Audigy 2 ZS and X-Fi Fatality) wiping them both clean and starting form scratch. I mean both of them worked "okay" but mine the EQ was broken and would lock up my Console in any mode, and on hers she has a Zen V Player so we use Creative Media Source for Rip/Burn library stuff for ease of compatibility(sic?)and it would play one song then lock up.

Both of those things may seem small but its always those stupid little things that break in Creatives software. I mean yes they NEED a working Vista driver but CMON why dont you at least get on for the current OS that the MAJORITY of users are on and at least get ONE set of decent drivers before you start on your next set of what Im sure will be years of the same "little things" with Vista and the XP drivers will just always be buggy.

 

[SpoonMuffin]

instag8r i can answer that question, because they already have peoples $, and in their oppenion "it works fine for most people" so why fix it?

creative has been like this since the LIVE days, i stoped using them for my own systems after the LIVE, i have and own audigy1/2/3/4 cards(got them all used out of tradein comps) but i only keep them incase for some reasion i cant get onboard working or cant get another brand card working.

creative has POOR support at best, they blame board/chipset/other hardware makers for errors/flaws in their software/hardware, look at the x-fi, read their forums, they blame the nf4 chipset for problems with x-fi, yet any other brand of soundcard u get will work FINE in nf4 boards.

as i have said b4 go cmedia for gaming+audio/movie stuff or VIA/Cmedia for audio(music and movies and such, via drivers suck for games)
or if your board has decent onboard use that, hdaudio onboard seems to be great as long as you use current updated drivers!!!!

 

[INSTG8R]

Well Spoon I will agree with all the points about Creative's software and support but the actual sound solutions are far superior to any onboard solution(I have HD on this board and I tried it and its terribly unimpressive) as for the "others" in card solutions Im afraid Im a slave to EAX and dont want to be stuck way back in 2.0.

 

[SpoonMuffin]

under vista it would be fine or better then current creative cards, due to the vista driver model not supporting hardware accelerated audio.

and it dependson the driver used and chip used, realtek are so/so, with up to date drivers(from realtek) its about as good as normal audigy for sound quility.
the ADI 1988 codecs acctualy in many ways are BETTER then x-fi, read the specs/whitepapers/data sheets to see why, eax is dead under vista, read up on how it works, and unlike many people think number of voices isnt bound to eax, its bound to hardware and software, cmedia's current chip can do 128voices(same as x-fi) but it can also do 192khz@7.1ch where as the x-fi can only do 96khz at 7.1, thats a huge quility diffrance

compare your x-fi with the razer or auzentech or omega hd or turtlebeach cards based on the 8788 chip, the x-fi looses in every way, even games tested by hard core gamers.

creative would be decent if they would test their hardware first AND make DECENT SOFTWARE, insted of teh bloated CRAP they have now.

i get so sick of "creatives the only way to game" its as untrue as "nvidia: the way its ment to be played" bouth are bs, its about hardware+software

good hardware is as bad as SHITTY hardware if its backed by SHITTY software(drivers)
low end "crappy" hardware can shine if the company puts time and effort into making good drivers, hence the 8738 and 8768 and even 9761a cmedia codecs/chips can really shine with current up-to-date drivers, because cmedia has bothered to update and debug drivers, oh yeah and the drivers are SMALL less then 1/10 the size of creatives driver+controle center, thats sad since the cmi drivers all include a BETTER THEN CREATIVE control center tool(xear)

look up some reviews where x-fi is compared with the razer or auzentech's latest card, u will be supprised im sure better 3d possitional audio, higher quility audio in games and music/movies, sure its more $ then a cheap x-fi, but u can get the same chip in the OMEGA brand for a reasonable price(for a high end soundcard that is) i have installed 2 razer cards and 3 x-med...whatever(auzentech cards) so far and they all went in flawless, nf4,nf5,nf6100,ati 1600,nf3 all accepted the cards without a hitch(one of the nf4 systems simply wont work wth x-fi due to the drivers sucking and hardware not being truely pci complyant) but we slaped in a razer soundcard and it worked in seconds, no studdering, no poping/cracking just clean strong wonderfull sound.

 

[Easy Rhino]

creative always seems to be way behind everyone. i doubt they even knew about vista until last week.

 

[Mad-Matt]

to be fait though, microsoft did kinda do the dirty and destroy all the work done by creative to get good hardware accelerated sound. creative have got a much harder job to do now to patch it back into vista without breaking anything.

its just as annoying reading about annoyed users as well when they themselvs knew before hand of the low compatability and performance of vista in the first place. it will be a long while before vista becomes a majority os.

its only a matter of time before they decide to drop accelerated gfx support and it all has to be done in software or virtualised on hardware.

 

[Deleted member 24505]

i'm using the beta driver for my xtreme music on home premium.it seems to work ok.

microsoft certainly screwed up creative tho',just when they release the x-fi card,microsoft release vista whiich undid all the good things about the x-fi.

will the x-fi support hardware accelerated opengl tho when the driver is sorted? and will this alchemy thing slow the x-fi down? its not just having to decode it now it seems its having to convert from one thing to another on vista.

also does the x-fi natively support opengl and just needs the driver or does the driver enable opengl,or summat?

 

[WarEagleAU]

Never had a problem with Creative or their soundcards. Work great for me and continue to do so. Good thing is, Im not hurting for Vista drivers because I didnt upgrade to it yet..

 

[Alec§taar]

There are 7,000 or so new API calls to master in VISTA folks... that's NOT a small number.

Do they need to master ALL of them? No, probably not, & not for this project, but the point's there... PLUS, DirectX 10 changed things as well, & imo? Coding DirectX is harder than say OpenGL based on my experience's with them (for display API coding that is, DirectX as you all know, controls a LOT more than just display).

Plus, I'd imagine that Windows VISTA changed the DDK (device driver kit) quite a bit, because of the changes to it, vs. it's predecessor in Windows Server 2003, which VISTA is based off of.

I say that occurred, most likely because the OS itself changed a LOT @ that level (under the pretty AERO GLASS skin in usermode/Ring3/RPL3 stuff, down into kernelmode/Ring 0/RPL 0 stuff) & the development teams out there have to adjust. It has changed quite a bit there... Address Space Randomization features in VISTA (a good thing for security) alone tells me so.

Some teams adjust faster than others too. A given.

We've seen this before guys:

DOS/Win3.x -> Win9x -> NT -> 2000 (the most radical change periods imo, where we had to wait not ONLY for drivers many times, but also applications for various purposes period to appear)!

HEY, imo @ least though? This is the least of anyone's worries w/ VISTA... drivers'll come. Again, we've seen this type of thing, before, we lived.

DRM & OpenGL being pulled? Man... to me, this is bothersome.

APK

P.S.=> I wouldn't get a piece of hardware for VISTA that didn't have a driver... I would either sell it if it did not have one (& I could not be patient, sometimes you can't) OR buy one that did... apk

 

[Scavar]

I wonder how much work it would be to force hardware support back into Vista.....

 

[SpoonMuffin]

There are 7,000 or so new API calls to master in VISTA folks... that's NOT a small number.

Do they need to master ALL of them? No, probably not, & not for this project, but the point's there... PLUS, DirectX 10 changed things as well, & imo? Coding DirectX is harder than say OpenGL based on my experience's with them (for display API coding that is, DirectX as you all know, controls a LOT more than just display).

Plus, I'd imagine that Windows VISTA changed the DDK (device driver kit) quite a bit, because of the changes to it, vs. it's predecessor in Windows Server 2003, which VISTA is based off of.

I say that occurred, most likely because the OS itself changed a LOT @ that level (under the pretty AERO GLASS skin in usermode/Ring3/RPL3 stuff, down into kernelmode/Ring 0/RPL 0 stuff) & the development teams out there have to adjust. It has changed quite a bit there... Address Space Randomization features in VISTA (a good thing for security) alone tells me so.

Some teams adjust faster than others too. A given.

We've seen this before guys:

DOS/Win3.x -> Win9x -> NT -> 2000 (the most radical change periods imo, where we had to wait not ONLY for drivers many times, but also applications for various purposes period to appear)!

HEY, imo @ least though? This is the least of anyone's worries w/ VISTA... drivers'll come. Again, we've seen this type of thing, before, we lived.

DRM & OpenGL being pulled? Man... to me, this is bothersome.

APK

P.S.=> I wouldn't get a piece of hardware for VISTA that didn't have a driver... I would either sell it if it did not have one (& I could not be patient, sometimes you can't) OR buy one that did... apk

i agree with the 7000api calls but i also know they had MANY MANY MANY months to get on it, same with nvidia, they didnt start working on vista drivers during beta stages(when ms was already allowing them to do so) they waited till the last minute then blame ms, typical blame game crap.

vista can have hacked in hardware accelerated audio, but it takes time and testing, something creatives never been good at(testing isnt their strong suit)

ms made this move for a good reasion tho, to stop all the crap about "eax2 vs eax3 vs eax4, vs eax5" and such same reasion they made dx10 the way they did, they want to bring everybody as close to being on the same page as possable, the problem is that they also cut out some nice things, like the option to use vendor/chip spicific calls,(true for bouth sound and video really) but by doing that they are hoping to avoid another fx line vs r300 situation where a card came out that COULDNT do what it was sold to do.

frustrating for ms as well as nvidia and any gamer whos tryed to use their "dx9" fx card in dx9 mode.

creative is not being forced to acctualy do real driver development, duno if they are up to the task...