3 New X-Fi models announced.

The right card finaly came along. Fatal1ty Extreme Gamer.

Fatal1ty card with xram but without xdrive bay. just wish they would create the perfect card by putting the expantion socket on a seperate cable and put firewire back on and not too mention proper digital out ports with realtime digital encoding for eax to work over digital.
 
Thanks for the post, was going to order an xtreme music for gaming. The Xtreme gamer Fatal1ty seems perfect to future proof my system audio-wise. Does anyone have an idea when the xtreme gamer will be released over here, and price? After a currency conversion it comes out to about £80, but then converting the US price for the retail xtreme music comes to £53, so i'm sure it'll be over that figure.

Also, what exactly is the difference between the regular xtreme gamer and the xtreme music, besides the size and colour scheme?
 
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Otaku Punk said:
Thanks for the post, was going to order an xtreme music for gaming. The Xtreme gamer Fatal1ty seems perfect to future proof my system audio-wise. Does anyone have an idea when the xtreme gamer will be released over here, and price? After a currency conversion it comes out to about £80, but then converting the US price for the retail xtreme music comes to £53, so i'm sure it'll be over that figure.

Also, what exactly is the difference between the regular xtreme gamer and the xtreme music, besides the size and colour scheme?
Click to expand...

The gamer has ram on it
 
MadMatty said:
The right card finaly came along. Fatal1ty Extreme Gamer.

Fatal1ty card with xram but without xdrive bay. just wish they would create the perfect card by putting the expantion socket on a seperate cable and put firewire back on and not too mention proper digital out ports with realtime digital encoding for eax to work over digital.
Click to expand...

Totally - I liked having a convenient firewire port...
 
Firegod said:
I thought that X-Ram did nothing? Gimmick? Anyone got any links showing fps benefits with this stuff?
Click to expand...

Probably is a gimmick TBH.

Apparently Quake 4 takes advantage of the X-RAM but ive had the Fatal1ty version with the front bay and the Xtreme music i have now. To be honest ive noticed no difference at all in sound quality.
 
http://www.guru3d.com/newsitem.php?id=3005

Last week we published our review of the SoundBlaster X-Fi Fatality soundcard from Creative Labs. One of the questions that remained to be answered was why Creative decide to go for a PCI only based soundcard, we found out that in the near future there will not be a PCI-Express version of the sound card. Steve Erickson, vice president for Creative's audio products was kind enough to answer this particular question specifically, here's his take:

As far as PCI Express (PCIe) is concerned, which is the next bus, what we found is that the performance of PCIe is truly bad for audio. We are seeing four times degradation on the bus for audio.

PCIe is designed for graphics and high data transfer, but audio sends very small packets and the overhead can be very big! Moving the data across PCIe is much, much higher than PCI. So what we have to do is go back to the drawing board and work on the transport part of the chip and re-design it to add more silicon to overcome some of the problems we had with PCIe. So for us to come up with a PCIe solution is going to take a while because we have to overcome the problems we're facing with that bus.
Click to expand...
 
I thought PCI-E had a really low latency... and what does he mean by "degradation". Surely data doesn't just crap out when transmitted over PCI-E?! Otherwise we're in a bit of trouble with our graphics and LAN cards :p methinks the dude's full of the smelly stuff...

(Thanks for the post though Phil99 :))
 
I wish creative would hurry up and release a soundcard that can encode surround to dolby on the fly, so i can just use an optical or coax to connect to my amp, and get nice surround sound in games from it, would be so much easier
 
I posted the reason why creative dont use pci-e absolutly yonks ago.
pci-e may be high in bandwidth but it sucks for latency.

As for the new models, it seems rather pointless to have soo many versions of the same dsp. There should be low, midrange, gamer and high end and thats it, not 3-4 value cards etc.
 
but why no optical out and in on cards?
sems creative want you to purchase products that dont work
Add digital I/O to your Sound Blaster equipped PC


BTW way that product only outputs 2 PCM audio
so why is it advdertised a optical in and out


a found out why they dont do optical and coaxial outputs
they dont wont to pay the license fee.

thats why they want you to buy the external crap
because the dolby license fee is paid with expansion bay.
 
james32 said:
but why no optical out and in on cards?
sems creative want you to purchase products that dont work
Add digital I/O to your Sound Blaster equipped PC


BTW way that product only outputs 2 PCM audio
so why is it advdertised a optical in and out
Click to expand...

It's perfectly ok to advertise it as optical in and out because it provides an optical in and out port. It doesn't have to be 5.1 to be transmitted over optical.

a found out why they dont do optical and coaxial outputs
they dont wont to pay the license fee.

thats why they want you to buy the external crap
because the dolby license fee is paid with expansion bay.
Click to expand...

Not quite, they pay the license for the inbuilt decoder and the front panel/optical adapter don't have anything to do with Dolby, they're just standard in/outputs.
 
Now if only they eventually made a card with built in optical outputs as well as DDL/DTS encodeing.

Need DDL/DTS encodeing for my sound system but the only cards that do that are the X-Mystique & X-Plosion, their drivers are pretty poor for some games. :(
 
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