Creative X-Fi XtremeGamer...so good that...?

RaptorZX3 · Post by **RaptorZX3** » Sun Nov 18, 2007 12:02 am

ok, i wonder if the Creative X-Fi XtremeGamer series (normal and Fatal1ty series) is so good that you can hear the slightest imperfections?

Like in a sound or a song being played on web radios, soundtracks rips or badly-equalized-recorded songs.

i've been hearing some imperfections like this in Unreal Tournament 3 beta demo once during a game, maybe it's a rare bug, i dunno...

johnniecache7 · Post by **johnniecache7** » Sun Nov 18, 2007 10:04 am

Creative X-Fi XtremeGamer is low profile version of the XtremeMusic so it could be also used in Mini lan Matx Cases. The XtremeMusic was the same card as the X-Fi XtremeGamer fatalty but without the X-Ram and heatsink on the X-Fi chip. The X-Ram only makes about 2 fps difference in games and rare that games use the X-Ram almost none use this feature.Most likely your experiencing Creative driver bugs the X-fi drivers are very buggy but they are getting better with the recent updates. Until this month they did not even work correctly on X64 systems with more then 4GB ram.

RaptorZX3 · Post by **RaptorZX3** » Sun Nov 18, 2007 2:35 pm

the XtremeGamer do have a small heatsink, and 2mb of X-Ram.

hmm where can i find better drivers for the X-Fi sound card series then? the latest drivers from Creative are from 2006...

walle · Post by **walle** » Sun Nov 18, 2007 4:02 pm

Perhaps a given one, but Iâ€™ll ask anyway; have you searched for possible beta drivers?

RaptorZX3 · Post by **RaptorZX3** » Sun Nov 18, 2007 4:10 pm

no beta driver available for the X-Fi series, on the Creative website anyway

Wibla · Post by **Wibla** » Sun Nov 18, 2007 6:24 pm

As long as youre gonna use digital output, buying a creative card is stupid alltogether, you cant get bit perfect 44khz from cds, and you cant get 5.1 digital from games (no dolby digital encoder).. for analog, well.. get something external for even less noise.

RaptorZX3 · Post by **RaptorZX3** » Sun Nov 18, 2007 6:31 pm

i noticed Unreal Tournament 3 beta demo, when you put Hardware OpenAL on, make more "click" noises when sounds plays (the click happen at the start or the end of the sound), so maybe it's only a bug in the OpenAL engine of the game or something.

i played Crysis SP demo to check for this, and i didn't notice any click coming from the sounds, nor in Live For Speed

i have 4.1 speakers i bought like...5-6 years ago (Cambridge Soundworks FPS1800)

RaptorZX3 · Post by **RaptorZX3** » Tue Nov 20, 2007 11:07 pm

i noticed some bugs also, in Second Life and Guild Wars, you can hear one audible "tick" when Winamp is playing in background and you're loading SL, just before the main login screen, it does that sound.

and in Guild Wars, it tend to do that sound when it "loads" new sounds, i don't know about this yet, but i do remember i was near a snow-covered spot when it did this (pre-loading sounds in memory?)

well i know a lot of peoples are complaining about the crappiness of the Creative X-Fi drivers, and YES they should update them soon, since they did it for Windows Vista drivers.

i still need to see if the beta drivers are good enough...

gforcefan · Post by **gforcefan** » Wed Nov 21, 2007 12:31 pm

unless you are using a mic, try disabling the mic in volume control. this may eliminate the ticks.

RaptorZX3 · Post by **RaptorZX3** » Wed Nov 21, 2007 1:13 pm

i don't even have a microphone plugged, and yes it's on Mute in Windows