Driver

The driver for the Creative Vanguard K08 is their Sound Blaster Connect application itself and can be downloaded from this page. As can be seen in the GIF above, installation is fairly straightforward.


If you do not have the keyboard or any other supported hardware device connected, the driver defaults to a software audio controller with some social media action included. Have the keyboard connected and the homepage changes to the one specific to the keyboard itself. I was prompted to update the keyboard's firmware first, which when clicked downloaded the firmware and told me that the driver was going to exit so I could update the firmware myself. Regardless of the driver not being capable of doing it within itself, it gave no instructions of where the firmware downloaded to or what I was to do. I ended up going back to the page where I had downloaded the driver to pick and download the firmware file as an executable and update the firmware myself. Not a great start!




The main emphasis of the driver is Creative's so-called Aurora Reactive Lighting, and lighting is indeed prominently displayed in the driver. The default option is "Personal", which is a rainbow wave that moves from the left to the right at a fairly brisk speed measured in BPM (beats per minute?). This lighting mode has options available to customize it, including the direction of motion, the color wheel with seven segments, and the speed of travel.

The other built-in lighting modes are all named and simple. In fact, there is a separate "Wave Rainbow" option which is the exact same as "Personal" at a slower speed. These are all variations of the four mode types - Solo (static), Cycle, Wave, and Pulse - and it really seems as though Creative included these variations for no other reason than to fill out the page. Then there is the lag involved as these modes activate, which is disappointing to see in 2017, where much more complex and powerful drivers have absolutely no perceivable lag. A combination of the lag and the driver being buggy results in some unpleasant things as well - the lighting on/off slider randomly changing seconds after being changed, and sometimes even without the prior click, or the BPM wheel showing incorrect values, just to name two.


There is an option to add your own, as seen in the video above, but this too is limited to what the other profiles contained, and the only new thing here is the ability to name it. You might as well simply edit the other lighting modes and call it a day. There is also an option to custom-light specific keys by selecting "custom" instead of "all", but this particular option is limited to "Solo" lighting only. The specific color selection is complete with 16.8 M colors to choose from or manually enter.


The Performance tab has three options - switch repeat delay, switch repeat rate, and keyboard polling rate. The third option is self-explanatory, and I do not think anyone will bother changing it from the default 1000 Hz anyway since the polling rate is a non-issue as soon as you move past boot-up with this keyboard. The other two go from long to short and slow to fast with no quantification of what these empirical values refer to. There is a test box below, but it would have been nice to know exactly what the sliders' values correspond to.

Up until a few weeks ago, the macro tab was not even present in the driver. Creative really needs to step up here and make sure their software releases are going to actually support the hardware product and not take away from it. But as it is, the macro section does work, and the dedicated macro buttons are finally useful now. The macro section is not very intuitive in my opinion, and some help tools would have been useful. Also, if you have more than one keyboard connected to the PC, the key remapping or macro recording will only take input from the Creative Vanguard K08 and no other keyboard, which I thought was weird and a potential issue should you have a bad switch and were looking to remap that function to a less often used key using this driver. Key assignment also means keyboard programmabilty, so if you do not like QWERTY and wanted to try out Dvorak or Colemak, you can most definitely do so. Just note that the keycaps' OEM profile means their sculpting differs from row to row.

Overall, the driver is fairly basic and simple, which leaves a lot to be desired if you have used drivers from Creative's competitors. They did mention that this is not a custom driver yet and that it relies on native Windows inbox class drivers and HID commands. The absence of an "apply" button concept could thus well be the reason for the delays and bugs, and Creative is working on a big UX update scheduled to come out this August. It is no doubt good for a first attempt, but time will tell how feature updates and bug fixes are handled.