Creative Audigy!!

[Dr Mordrid]

Well, I won't allow a VIA chipset in my lab. I use nothing but Intel and AMD. Maybe this'll change in time, but not now.

Dr. Mordrid

[Gurm]

My problems are because of my VIA chipset? I think not.

Tried it on a BX.

Here are my MAJOR problems:

1. On _some_ systems (both VIA and Intel) i263 video blue screens the system unless you disable hardware audio acceleration. Even if you run an i263 with no audio in it. WTF is that? It's "better" with the new drivers. Every i263 video on every system did it with the last betas.

2. Warbling voices in Infinity Engine games. Considering my wife and I are working our way through BG1 and Planescape, moving on to TOSC, Icewind Dale, HOW, BG2, and TOB... this is a BIG deal.

3. A few clicks, usually related to multiple sounds playing, but for a card with 32 hardware voices...

- Gurm

[Technoid]

If I am realy lucky my Audigy will arrive today....

Othervise I have to wait until monday

Gurm,

Is it just one card or several TBSC cards?

[Gurm]

A TBSC and a GTXP using the TBSC drivers. So multiple cards.

- Gurm

[Technoid]

Monday!!!

And I who wanted to test it this weekend

[Randy Simons]

Originally posted by Gurm
Ahh... certified Santa Cruz drivers are just as bad as previous betas - which is to say glitchy with certain video codecs (!!! yes video, crashes with a blue screen even if audio is disabled !!!), and no luck with Infinity Engine games.

Wow.. funny thing, I've a terratec DMX XFire running with these Santa Cruz drivers (hacked them a bit

They work fine, so it seems (far better than the Terratec drivers. ) but I still have system freezes when I watch movies. Always. MPEG/DivX3/4.. Do you happen to know if all CS46xx-based cards/drivers suffer the same problems as the Santa Cruz?

I did test things with no audio (removed the drivers) on my G200, but that was with the G200 (have a G400 now) and with possible broken voltage-regulator on motherbord (hopefully fixed now).. No spare soundcard though.

[Indiana]

Can you explain exactly which problems you had with the Terratec drivers? Since I have none. I didn't have really MAJOR problem with the SBLive either but there always were those slight annoying things: bad sound-quality, occassional clicks on HEAVY system / disk activity (vid-capturing) even on Intel chipsets, non-working AC3out , crappy drivers with a latency that can be actually HEARD, static on the digital!! out,... (to be continued) NONE of them are present with the DMX Xfire in Win2k with Terratecs drivers so which problems do you encounter?

I often do vid-capturing (mainly HuffYUV, then compressing the clips to DivX4) and VERY often watch DivX or Mpeg movies but I NEVER had any single crash because of this. What are your systems specs?

[Randy Simons]

Note: I'm using windows2000, I don't know about Windows9x/me.

The Terratec drivers in W2k have extremely poor 3D support, unusable. A3D sucks (but it still sucks with those TBSC drivers... Even it somehow works, the effect is much less "real" than with a Vortex2 card (damn, A3D 2 simply ROCKS!))
Next, in some games, especially Diablo2 (-EX) the sounds are kind of chopped at the start. The card is capable of decoding MP3 in hardware, but the DirectShow filters simply don't work. Well, I haven't figured them out at least. The features of the drivers is really limited as well. This chip has *much* more potential than what the drivers allow.

But, I used Gurm's trick and disabled audio hardware acceleration and was able to play a movie of almost 2 hours without a freeze. While that is not convincing that that's a workaround for the freezing-problem, it still is remarkable. Could it be that there's a conflict between a Matrox card and a Crystal SoundFusion driver/chipset?

[Gurm]

If there is, then there's also a conflict between a Kyro card and that chipset, an nVidia card and that chipset... etc. etc. ad nauseum.

Happens with all cards.

- Gurm

[Randy Simons]

Hmm, so much for the HWQL certification... Ah well, I still haven't got a freeze since I disabled hardware acceleration, which is nice, but now I've no hardware acceleration

Other people here with the Terratec card and those official Terratec drivers having problems?

[addon]
*freeze*
I've kicked them away and re-installed the Terratec drivers. But somehow I don't think that's going to solve my problem...
[/addon]

[Archeon]

I'm actually quite curious how well that small network setup via the Firewire ports of two Audigy cards works.
According to Firingsquad it's possible (out of the box) to connect two Audigy cards to each other via the firewire ports and use them as network cards. Except that it's about 4 x faster than a normal 100base/t card.
Since I absolutely HATE the crawling speed of 100 baseT this would be a valid reason for me to upgrade to Audigy. I don't care much if the sound quality has improved or not. I've got 2 SB live's in my two PC's now and I'm quite happy with their sound quality. And if sound quality would improve, than that would be just an added bonus.

Has anybody tried that firewire 'network' yet?

[Gurm]

I haven't done it, but the software that comes with the card sets up the 1394 port as a network adapter... this functionality is included with Windows XP (another reason to upgrade to XP), btw.

- Gurm

P.S. Sony has been shipping something like this with their laptops for a while now, iirc. Or maybe it could just be that I always put WinXP on machines I use.

[Wombat]

The <I>crawling</I> speed of 100Mbit? That's ~12MB/sec. Probably about the same as the sustained feed of your hard drive. If you think it's crawling, you probably have something misconfigured.

4 out of 5 times, 100Mbit networking isn't where the bottleneck lies.

[Gurm]

Yeah. I love it when people think something is wrong because they're not getting 200MB/sec. or something.

Face it, people. Your hard drive only does 25MB/sec. maximum. No more.

- Gurm

[Wombat]

If I had to guess at a possible cause, I'd say your network connection is suffering b/c of bad network wiring, or something is hogging your PCI bus. If it's the latter, a faster network connection won't help you. Try letting your devices have the PCI bus for 64 cycles instead of 32, if you haven't already.