Vista, Creative X-Fi & Alchemy

[Noc0de]

Anyone got it working well? The official specs on the website say:

Sound Blaster® X-Fi™ series sound card (Note: Requires Creative ALchemy for Windows Vista)

I've tried alchemy and all it results in is funky sound thats hissing and popping or clipped. I've tried changing a few of the application specific settings under Alchemy without a huge amount of joy.

Anyone got it working on Vista?

 

[Worfen]

Anyone got it working well? The official specs on the website say:



I've tried alchemy and all it results in is funky sound thats hissing and popping or clipped. I've tried changing a few of the application specific settings under Alchemy without a huge amount of joy.

Anyone got it working on Vista?

Wouldn't that just be a requirement for EAX? What happens if you disable EAX ingame?

 

[emma]

Vista and Creative SB/XFI cards have never got on well, i ripped mine out as it was causing more hastle than its worth.. Which really sucks for me as i have some decent 5.1 digital speakers.

 

[Xandax]

I have no problems but I do not run surround and all that and can't remember if I have eax enabled. (Vista x64 and X-Fi)

I get sound from it at least.

 

[MagrothJ]

I have no problem whatsoever with Vista 32 and X-Fi. I don't use Alchemy though since it works perfectly without it. If I've understood it correctly you only need Alchemy to run games with EAX/Hardware sound enabled. With newer games there's usually no problem though and you don't have to worry about EAX/Hardware sound/Alchemy.

 

[Dervish]

Not sure if this helps your discussion but it is well worth getting full surround sound enabled in the game. I have XP Pro and and oldish Soundblaster Audigy (the original one). Clicking that EAX option in the settings window not only makes for better atmospheric sounds but also places all sound sources in true surround. I have a reasonable set of 5.1 speakers and the difference to immersion after just checking the EAX box was amazing. My rig is in my conservatory and after enabling that box I honestly thought a fight had broken out in my back garden.

 

[Khale]

I have Vista x64 and XiFi and it works fine. Just make sure you get the right drivers and not a 32-bit version or a broken Alchemy version.

And don't forget to turn a motherboard onboard soundcard off cause they seem to seriously conflict with my SoundBlaster XiFi card.

 

[Muylaetrix]

I have Vista x64 and XiFi and it works fine. Just make sure you get the right drivers and not a 32-bit version or a broken Alchemy version.

And don't forget to turn a motherboard onboard soundcard off cause they seem to seriously conflict with my SoundBlaster XiFi card.

could it be that the drivers fail to find the XFI at all due to that ? ... no compatible hardware found ...

 

[Noc0de]

Apologies, I realised I should have explained myself better!

It's the EAX I'm trying to get enabled.

It works fine without the EAX, but I wouldn't mind having it enabled.

Just wondering if others have got EAX working under Vista with an X-Fi card?

 

[caswallawn]

vista and EAX are known not to like each other as my ASUS D2X supports EAX but the option doesnt work under vista. possibly for the same reason under dxdiag on vista you cant change hardware accelleration on sound cards. so realy it just looks like one of those yhings you have to live with till the people who make the hardware get it working.

 

[Muylaetrix]

i bought an asus ati 3650 vid card and somehow i feel unhappy with it.

it seems they wanted to add features to it that made it not compatible with standard ATI drivers. if i want to install the latest (or any) ATI drivers it just says it doesn`t find any compatible hardware !!! it doesn`t work with any drivers except for those suplied by asus.

how many people have issues with ASUS video cards in this game ?

 

[dnd]

i have x64 and x-fi, believe i have alchemy installed.

no EAX button for me, it's greyed out.

 

[Motowntheta]

With my previous machine I used to have no end of problem with hissing and popping of sound in many games. This was worse in Vista 64 then XP 32. Now Under XP I was able to run specific graphics card drivers and have no problems with the sound, which was strange. I think alot of the problem is down to inbuilt motherboard latency and it's effect with X-Fi. I also had major soound loops in games such as TF2 (never under XP only vista)

I never found a reasonable solution for Vista, so I just got a new machine This works like a dream..... I hated my old XPS 710.

 

[Noc0de]

i have x64 and x-fi, believe i have alchemy installed.

no EAX button for me, it's greyed out.

Yeah, you need to manually create a entry/profile for WAR within alchemy and move it across to the right-hand-pane to activate it.

I still didn't get the EAX tick-box enabled in WAR, but if you run the game in XP SP2 compatability mode you get it.

That's when I get the crappy sound. So I tried fiddling with the alchemy settings and have varied results - but still not what I want.

I've since gone back to disabling EAX, disabling XP SP2 compability mode and disabling WARS alchemy entry to get it working. But this is obviously still without EAX.

It's just odd they advertise the game as working with X-Fi/EAX and that you've got to use Alchemy under Vista to get this working. However, that doesn't seem to be the case. Wonder if anyone else that's got Vista and an X-Fi card could try and get EAX working?

 

[firespark]

Thing is (and this is for Vista alone) the drivers currently released by Creative did get fixed completely. Just not by Creative employees. There's a person Daniel K. who's clouded in mystery. As he was officially witchhunted by Creative and he did manage to get the drivers to work. I've been using them for over a week or two now and don't have any issues with them at all. Please google his name for a proper result. The driver package is around 64 megs i think.

Before it was crackle pop crackle with my Audigy 2 Zs.

 

[Noc0de]

Thing is (and this is for Vista alone) the drivers currently released by Creative did get fixed completely. Just not by Creative employees. There's a person Daniel K. who's clouded in mystery. As he was officially witchhunted by Creative and he did manage to get the drivers to work. I've been using them for over a week or two now and don't have any issues with them at all. Please google his name for a proper result. The driver package is around 64 megs i think.

Before it was crackle pop crackle with my Audigy 2 Zs.

Yeah, I'm aware of that. The initial drivers released for Vista by Creative really did suck in a big way - there was all sorts of bugs, like the sound hissing constantly if you had Vista x64 with 4GB of RAM.

I did used to use Daniel K's driver set a while back. However, I was under the impression that Creative pulled their arm out of their ass and actually fixed all the issues back in June/July. I've been using those drivers since then and everything that previously didn't work - does now work.

This is the first real issue I've had since then, and it's just bugging me that the game developers for WAR are saying it works - when clearly I'm having problems with Vista + X-Fi + Alchemy + EAX.

 

[caswallawn]

I have just been looking through the xnl files for the settings and came across this.

    <Audio enabled="true" master_volume="1.00" speaker_config="Unknown" eax_enabled="false">
        <Effects enabled="true" volume="1.00" />
        <Music enabled="true" volume="0.50" />
    </Audio>

the file is found at "C:\Warhammer Online - Age of Reckoning\user" is it possible the problem with the EAX not working is the game not actualy detecting the speaker setup? I tried manualy edditing the file with dreamweaver but as soon as you start the game it resets to this and EAX still wont work.

 

[Hawkwind]

i bought an asus ati 3650 vid card and somehow i feel unhappy with it.

it seems they wanted to add features to it that made it not compatible with standard ATI drivers. if i want to install the latest (or any) ATI drivers it just says it doesn`t find any compatible hardware !!! it doesn`t work with any drivers except for those suplied by asus.

how many people have issues with ASUS video cards in this game ?

Asus are great at that, infamous for not following the correct specs. I once contacted their Customer Support and they informed me the graphics card I had would only work properly with an Asus Mobo! After further investigation the problem turned out to be the Mobo and RAM combination.

 

[Raven]

I have an X-FI sound board (creative Fatality) and an Asus board (republic of gamers thingy) no problems at all with sound or sound drivers on Vista 64 on any other game/program except WAR, as in the EAX is disabled and greyed out. It is NOT a windows issue or a driver issue, it is an issue with WAR and compatibility with Vista, I don't know if WAR is designed for DX10 and Vista in its current form it doesn't look as though it is.

Hopefully it will be fixed with a future patch but its not the end of the world, I still get sound

Having finally got myself settled with Vista I am thinking of downstepping to get the most out of WAR.

Generally disappointed with the graphics and sound in WAR, it looks and sounds like its 2-3-4 years old. Lucky the gameplay more than makes up for it

Wasn't there issues in the beta with DX10 settings and whatnot that were not enabled? Whether they are still missing from the game I don't know, hopefully they improve the graphics so that those of us with high end machines can push them a bit.

 

[Muylaetrix]

Wasn't there issues in the beta with DX10 settings and whatnot that were not enabled? Whether they are still missing from the game I don't know, hopefully they improve the graphics so that those of us with high end machines can push them a bit.

i think i read somewhere you are better of installing directx 9.0c also on vista as apparantly both versions just coexist comfortably without issues.

And to get most of the graphics at this moment you have to force the drivers to use AA and AF as those options haven`t been put into the game yet. this was probably done for stability issues.

setting AA to x8 instead of `application managed` and AF to x16 instead of `application managed` on an ATI card can be quickly done from the change resolution button in your taskbar, or via the Catalyst Control Center or ati tray tools (that`s a third party program) and improves the looks of the game by a lot.

 

[caswallawn]

the game doesnt have DX10 support and if you read the logs from start up it only picks up cards as shader modle 3.0 at the most. so if they do have support for DX10 the game cant detect the hardware.

 

[Dervish]

i think i read somewhere you are better of installing directx 9.0c also on vista as apparantly both versions just coexist comfortably without issues.

And to get most of the graphics at this moment you have to force the drivers to use AA and AF as those options haven`t been put into the game yet. this was probably done for stability issues.

setting AA to x8 instead of `application managed` and AF to x16 instead of `application managed` on an ATI card can be quickly done from the change resolution button in your taskbar, or via the Catalyst Control Center or ati tray tools (that`s a third party program) and improves the looks of the game by a lot.

If you have a beefy enough gfx card to enable those settings without turning the game to a slideshow ofc....

 

[Raven]

Put mine up last night, looks much better