Creative talks X-FI PCI-E

CREATIVE HAS BEEN talking about the upcoming X-Fi PCI Express card, and the firm's comments make for some interesting talking points.

You can check out the interview here.

First off, the news is that X-Fi Extreme Audio will finally be appearing on PCI-E next month. After what seems like years of delay, the upgrade that seemed a no-brainer is finally taking place. So why the delay? Well, Creative has reported problems with the design of the bus, citing overhead problems. Apparently, the last 12 months have been spent working around these.

So the Extreme Audio will launch, will be Vista compatible, and will support the new Universal Audio Architecture that Microsoft has developed. This edition of the card will be the John the Baptist to the Fatal1ty and Extreme Gamer editions. Also returning will be the X-RAM - Creative's own 64MB of on-card memory. Despite the fact it has been shunned, for the most part, by the gaming industry - appearing only in the Quake and Battlefield series - Creative is still pushing it as a big differentiator over motherboard audio.

There is still the problem of HDMI audio - as high-end users start to build their own HD movie systems, HDMI outputs from graphics cards are starting to become the norm. Creative says that there is still not a standard for connecting audio outputs to graphics cards to ping the audio along with the video signal, and that there are no promises as to compatibility right now.

As for future software and features, Creative is betting the house on its Alchemy software, which transmutes DirectX audio games to OpenAL, thus allowing the driver to talk directly to the hardware. This doesn't seem too elegant, and rather suggests an air of dirty hackery. However, the company is adamant that its approach works. We wonder how long Microsoft will sit back and watch its sound API be subverted. µ