Time to sell high-end Creative sound cards?

[imported_Com80787]

I have been reading about Vista and the changes Microsoft has made to the audio system. From what I am reading it sounds like current high end consumer sound cards (such as the X-fi) won't even have hardware accelleration anymore.

Given Creatives track record of very poor driver support, and releasing "new" hardware only to enable functionality they could have in previous hardware, I have to wonder - are Creative X-fi cards about to be worth a whole lot less when (if) Vista takes hold? Is it possible Creative will leave the X-fi series crippled and release a new series to replace them?

If so maybe it's a good idea to sell our X-fi cards before they completely devalue?

 

[WraithETC]

If you search anandtech here you'll find a post talking about how creative created drivers to work around vista. These drivers allow for full audio acceleration of all games in Vista. It accomplishes this by converting all non open al sound sources in real time to open al. Creative is the only company to support full open al sound acceleration btw.

So actually creative has a stronger hold.

 

[Twsmit]

Actually the situation looks pretty good. As long as games use OpenAL for audio, surround sound and full hardware processing will be intact on vista. Also Creative is supposed to have a driver that will translate older direct3d (probably not the right terminology) into OpenAL on the fly.

 

[WraithETC]

Here is the article http://www.custompc.co.uk/custompc/...-after-all.html