Creative Labs doing something right?!?
Creative Labs has been around as long as Computer Gaming has been around, just about. Sound Blaster 16, for me, is synonymous with DOS and setting up Day of the Tentacle.
Creative, lately, has grown to have a reuptation of sucking ass. I didn't feel that way until I started having trouble with my DXR3 decoder card back in College and I found other people being frustrated at the lack of driver updates.
I've only seen it get worse into the Sound Blaster Audigy series of sound cards. Most people say that the AWE64 was their best card... I never had one so I don't have much to comment on it. I picked up an Audigy 2 ZS in Australia when I bought Doom 3 because I figured if I were going to shit my pants in fear, I should do it with the best quality surround-sound I could have. That, and the onboard sound in my computer at the time had not so great quality and it actually bothered my ears.
When Windows Vista came out, Creative Labs released a bare-bones driver for Vista... one that didn't support some of the core technology of the card -- EAX. Creative said that, due to the new driver model Windows Vista required for audio drivers, EAX isn't something that could be implemented. That has since been proven mostly wrong thanks in part to Daniel_K, although to be honest his drivers were pretty buggy for me.
The solution that Creative offered was to have a program called ALchemy that would 'wrap' EAX programming calls in games to the new, functional-in-Vista, OpenAL architecture. For Audigy 4 users, this program was free. For Audigy 2 users, this program cost $9.99, plus tax. I paid my nine dollars and had moderate success... it's not the greatest program out there; sometimes it even works.
Anyway, Creative has just announced that ALchemy will be free to Audigy 2 users and, as a gesture of goodwill, will be refunding anyone who paid.
I've been pretty down on Creative lately, but that isn't something I ever expected of them. Maybe there's hope yet...
Creative, lately, has grown to have a reuptation of sucking ass. I didn't feel that way until I started having trouble with my DXR3 decoder card back in College and I found other people being frustrated at the lack of driver updates.
I've only seen it get worse into the Sound Blaster Audigy series of sound cards. Most people say that the AWE64 was their best card... I never had one so I don't have much to comment on it. I picked up an Audigy 2 ZS in Australia when I bought Doom 3 because I figured if I were going to shit my pants in fear, I should do it with the best quality surround-sound I could have. That, and the onboard sound in my computer at the time had not so great quality and it actually bothered my ears.
When Windows Vista came out, Creative Labs released a bare-bones driver for Vista... one that didn't support some of the core technology of the card -- EAX. Creative said that, due to the new driver model Windows Vista required for audio drivers, EAX isn't something that could be implemented. That has since been proven mostly wrong thanks in part to Daniel_K, although to be honest his drivers were pretty buggy for me.
The solution that Creative offered was to have a program called ALchemy that would 'wrap' EAX programming calls in games to the new, functional-in-Vista, OpenAL architecture. For Audigy 4 users, this program was free. For Audigy 2 users, this program cost $9.99, plus tax. I paid my nine dollars and had moderate success... it's not the greatest program out there; sometimes it even works.
Anyway, Creative has just announced that ALchemy will be free to Audigy 2 users and, as a gesture of goodwill, will be refunding anyone who paid.
I've been pretty down on Creative lately, but that isn't something I ever expected of them. Maybe there's hope yet...