Sound acceleration does not work with Vista?

[imported_Smurf]

I've been shopping for a new sound card, but I hear sound acceleration doesn't work with Vista

The reviews say the same thing for all the X-Fi cards.

If you follow this LINK and "Sort by lowest rating," read the reviews:

Pros: None if you are using or planning on using Windows Vista.

Cons: Do yourself a favor and visit Creative's user forum before purchasing. No fully functional Vista drivers. Period. End of story.

Other Thoughts: Not Creative's fault, in a way, since MS decided not to support audio acceleration with the new OS. But clearly, potential customers need to be forewarned about this.

Pros: Nada. Worked perfectly until Vista, now...hmmm. BSOD after beta driver intall. Safe mode, uninstalled drivers. Installed new beta driver. Crack hiss pop. BSOD again. Uninstalled again. Bah! Who needs to aggravation

Cons: Imagine my surprise when I called Creative for some help and I found out you have to pay to speak with a tech. Unbelievable but true. Tech support is 12 bucks per 30 min session. Basically, you are forced to use their forum, which is useless since it's just filled with complaints and no fixes. This card is junk without decent drivers.

Other Thoughts: I wish Newegg would post a warning label on this product. Not Vista compatible for something like that. It might work on some machines. I guess it does. It doesn't work on mine.

Pros: None. Not only does the card not work, it takes my whole computer down with it.

Cons: The guys warning about Blue Screens of Death aren't exaggerating. If you are using Vista, there is a big chance that this card and/or its drivers will cause your machine to crash and burn. This is a fact - even Creative acknowledges the problem but seems totally clueless as to how to fix it.

Other Thoughts: Wait until the problems are fixed before buying. Otherwise, you're taking an awful big risk.

Should I get a soundcard for my Vista system, yet? It sounds like there isn't much of a point until Creative releases good drivers. (I have integrated 5.1 on my motherboard)

 

[Ichigo]

Creative's soundcards give me trouble on XP. -_-

Integrated sound is perfectly fine these days, you won't miss it.

 

[alcoholbob]

I believe DirectSound was ditched for OpenAL. Additionally, unlike in XP, where workarounds were "at least possible," bit-perfect playback is simply impossible now. Fixed frequency SPDIF output is corrupted by kmixer (you just get static now) with no driver workarounds for now. So my Chaintech AV-710 is now officially useless for bitperfect stereo playback or DTS streams. Everything is fixed at 48KHz or you just get static.

The things we pay for interface appearances

 

[QuantumPion]

I have been using an X-fi in Vista for a couple weeks now on my main machine. Alchemy seems to be working reasonably well although it could use some tweaking. I occasionally get sound artifacts or frame glitches, but nothing major. On my HTPC, which just has a realtek ac97 chip, digital sound (toslink to my receiver) for dolby/dts works fine for dvd movies. Software sound works fine for games. There is no hardware acceleration for any sound card in vista except the X-fi for the time being, although if you are just using an onboard sound device the only thing you lose is EAX 2 effects, as onboard devices use your CPU power regardless.