Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Fatal1ty FPS

The Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Fatality sound card was the best piece of equipment I could afford to buy when I made my latest PC. I'd gone for expensive and high-quality components because I use my machine for gaming. Gaming drives hardware manufacturers because ever more ambitious and demanding games software requires ever more powerful hardware.

The Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Fatality has 'XRAM' on-board that can take the load ...
...delighted to find that the Creative X-Fi Fatality could add some great effects to inputs in real time. These included chorus, reverb, digital delay, flanger and chorus. Not only that but an electric guitar could be grunged up a treat with distortion. It was even possible to engage combinations of these effects.

Finally, on the recording side still, there's a front panel into which a whole variety of devices might be connected via phono ... more

The Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Fatality sound card was the best piece of equipment I could afford to buy when I made my latest PC. I'd gone for expensive and high-quality components because I use my machine for gaming. Gaming drives hardware manufacturers because ever more ambitious and demanding games software requires ever more powerful hardware.

The Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Fatality has 'XRAM' on-board that can take the load of your processor according to the advertising and that's supposed to result in an increased FPS in games. This explains, no doubt, why the letters 'FPS' complete its full name. Frames Per Second is what it refers to and the faster the FPS, the smoother the animation of complex images will be when you're playing a game. This was a big selling point. I went for a powerful processor; I went for a powerful graphics card, and I went for this sound card because it was just about the best gaming card on the market so far as I could tell.

There's another reason for me to have spent around £160 less than a year ago for this card. It has enhanced modes in which it can run 'tuned' for games, entertainment or music creation.

Here's a quick breakdown of the 'modes'. Each has a distinctive set of controls when you choose it.

Entertainment Mode:

This allows you to play movie or music sound and alter various things. A lot of the feature like graphics equalisers are pretty standard but much was made of this cards 24bit 'Crystalizer'. It was claimed that it would make an MP3 sound more like a CD. That was obviously highly desirable. MP3s, after all, are usually of lower quality than CDs unless they're sample rates are larger than is conventional. EAX was another good thing as it promised to allow the user to use a range of hardware based reverb settings.

Gaming Mode:

With a click of a button the look and feel of the software in which these sorts of features can be transformed to gaming mode. A bluer and sportier looking interface enables adjustments to similar features but behind the scenes the software is intended to optimise the card for use with computer games. EAX effects have been very effective in games.

Audio Creation Mode:

And this was the clincher. I'm a musician with hundreds of pounds worth of music creation software on my machine so I wanted a card that was ideal for a home recording studio. The Fatality, set to this mode, has a large mixer interface that allows a great deal of control over recording signals. Using ASIO (Audio Stream Input/ Output) drivers such as those found in my studio software, a great deal of control over the card can be leveraged with many distinct tracks (as opposed to left and right channels) being accessible.

On the recording side, I was also delighted to find that the Creative X-Fi Fatality could add some great effects to inputs in real time. These included chorus, reverb, digital delay, flanger and chorus. Not only that but an electric guitar could be grunged up a treat with distortion. It was even possible to engage combinations of these effects.

Finally, on the recording side still, there's a front panel into which a whole variety of devices might be connected via phono leads, optical connectors, MIDI and so on. My big interest was that I could go straight into the computer with a guitar via a neat front panel. See my pictures. I'd have liked more than one of these full-sized Jack input sockets personally as I don't need all the other options. I do, however, need to go into the computer sound recording system with a microphone and a guitar at the same time. Still, no harm done. I bought a separate mixer to do that. It would just have been more convenient and made for a less cluttered desk.

I was delighted with the Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Fatality FPS sound card at first. The musical effects were especially handy when recording. Music seemed to be clearer with the Crystalizer to my ear as well. Later, I came to wonder if this was really so or if the effect might have been somewhat of a gimmick.

In games the EAX was very noticeable. I'd just built a muscle-bound PC with a CPU, graphics card, and lots of fast RAM that were always going to make games smooth so I couldn't say for sure how the FPS improved because of the on-board sound card RAM. Everything sounded fine and the games ran very smoothly, that much was certain. What I could tell was better was the quality of the reverb in games. It was fantastic. Skeletal spiders coming along metal walkways in Doom 3 sent out such clear and sinister echoes as they scrabbled along that the effect was truly terrifying! That - in the world of gaming anyway - is a very good thing so I was pleased.

If the story had ended right there I would have still been pleased with the Creative X-Fi Fatality but unfortunately that wasn't the case. There were some dark clouds on the horizon and sweeping in fast. Oblivious to these I continued to listen to music, run from the echoing spiders and record guitar and vocals.

What was the problem?

My machine was always intended to have Vista on it and it was soon to be released. How exciting! I'd expected the new OS to be the crowning glory of my lovingly made new PC. Games were promised that would use DirectX10 and that would be only available in Vista they said. My on-board sound card RAM would be there to help new generations of games whiz along on my new computer. It was going to be exciting. It was going to be expensive as well but I intended to keep up with new developments and not get left behind with useless old technology.

With this thought in mind, as soon as Vista hit the market I was on the 'phone to overclockers.co.uk where I've bought my bits for years. Check them out if you're a technical type. They have a nice site. Out came my Visa card and I was all ready to order Vista 64 bit Ultimate. I think it was because I read about products a lot on the Internet that I just asked the young man on sales if there was any truth to the rumours I'd noticed concerning X-Fi sound card compatibility with Vista. Of course, I expected him to say it would all be fine and to just take my order. In fact, he said he'd got one himself and it was given to fluctuations of volume and erratic performance under Vista! Compatibility was becoming an issue, he said.

It seemed that 32 bit Vista wasn't going to be the solution either. It might mean that more games and other software would be compatible but the X-Fi based sound cards weren't going to work right due to some technical reasons I didn't really understand. Well, that was honest! I was impressed with the his integrity but, of course, my credit card was put away again at once.

To find out what was going on with Vista and the Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Fatality FPS I turned to the Internet and found this site:

http://forums.creative.com/creativelabs/board?board.id=Vista

Now, although I can make a computer just fine, the technical explanations on this site get very difficult very quickly. However, if you are just completely brilliant you should be able to ascertain the problem in the thread by Catherine CL called 'Audio in Windows Vista'. I think what she's saying is that Microsoft suddenly changed the way their new operating system processes sound so radically that the X-Fi is now unable to work as it was intended.

There's also a thread she's put up and locked into place about 'Abusive Posts'. Well there were lots. I never wrote one but I'd have liked to. Customers who wrote in to say they'd just spent a small fortune with Creative felt badly treated and many said they'd shop elsewhere in future. Only, of course, young men can express themselves more emphatically than that when they're miffed....

Flames (rows) sprang up between fans of the company who saw no value in criticisms and those with the card who were losing sound or some of the card's functionality, and who clearly considered their complaints weren't producing drivers quickly enough that would overcome their issues.

Beta drivers and later versions of drivers were eventually released and so it may well be that many of these problems have now been resolved. However, I see in the latest driver release information that there are these still a number of 'known issues'. Let me come back to my scary spiders from Doom 3. One of the issues is with Direct Sounds based EAX games. What could be worse than skeletal spiders that sound like they're wearing slippers? In fact, Creative have come up with a solution to this, as I understand it, by making a software patch or add on called 'Alchemy'.

The problem as I see it is that Vista has been produced in such a way as to abandon the very things that made the Creative X-Fi Fatality FPS so desirable in the first place. In the new operating system it would appear that the sound for games and for everything else is going to be dealt with by the CPU. That's just the point of the inbuilt RAM of the X-Fi cards - to take the pressure off the CPU! However, the thinking must be that the super-fast modern processors like the Duo and Quad CPUs from Intel should be so mighty as to be able to do the games and the sound on top without flinching.

This is probably incorrect. New games come along driving the PC industry forward more than any business application ever could. New games will probably appear that will make even the newest and beefiest system stagger under the requirements. That's just when the hardware assistance of a Fatality sound card should have been of the greatest benefit. Now it won't be. It will be playing older games in Vista through Alchemy which is effectively a way of emulating the functions of the X-Fi's hardware acceleration capabilities without getting any of the benefits in performance. It's just going to allow old games compatibility.

Some have argued that anyone who didn't look on the box and check the exact specifications regarding Vista compatibility have only themselves to blame. Others - and I agree with this second group - entirely disagree. Vista was a long time coming and Microsoft and Creative had plenty of time to thrash these issues out and provide a full and proper continuity of functionality. Nobody, in my opinion, could reasonably have been considered negligent in buying one of the latest and best X-Fi sound cards from the most famous producer of them in the world, Creative, and expecting it to work with the latest and greatest operating system, Vista, from the biggest OS producer in the world, Microsoft.

Who is to blame? Is it the OS with these changes in it? Is it the company that made it? Is it the flagship sound card that sank the moment Vista came out? Is it the slowness of driver development and customer support that followed? Is it the customer for thinking that new technological developments would be compatible and functional and who is now befuddled at finding they're neither?

Has the issue been fixed or addressed properly? This is a matter for debate and research although a tale like this might affect your decision when looking for a new sound card.

There's a new kid on the block now, described by overclockers.co.uk as 'X-Fi reborn'. It's an Auzentech X-Fi Prelude 7.1 and the name suggests that an association has been made between Creative and another company to produce it. My bottom lip trembles to see this though because, if the Auzentech X-Fi Prelude 7.1 is my card 'reborn' then I must have a card that cost an arm and a leg under a year ago, but that the industry sees as effectively dead.

The good news is that these reports of its death are greatly exaggerated. The Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Fatality FPS is still very much alive and kicking so long as it's running in Windows XP. As all of the functions including hardware acceleration are proving perfectly reliable in that OS, and as the Internet is filled with comparative tables to show that gaming FPS goes down in most games when you change to Vista, the simple answer is this: use the Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Fatality FPS. It works perfectly just so long as you stay with the OS it was designed for. That's Windows XP.

Conclusions:

Because this sound card is clearly a mismatch for Vista and has forced me to put my credit card away and not buy it, I can hardly recommend it to anyone else. It may be that the long-standing driver issues from Creative will lead to this card behaving properly after all this time. So far, on a machine where the music side is 'mission critical', I can't afford to let anyone down and ruin their recording with audio errors, and haven't dared upgrade to the new OS. I did consider trying Linux but Creative have no drivers for this card that will work with Linux either. Perhaps that's quite telling.

When I chose the Fatality sound card I thought I was getting the best at a premium. Now, if I had to choose again today, I wouldn't go for the same one as it doesn't do what I expected insofar as games aren't accelerated in hardware under Vista and I'm left quite unsure what the consequences would be if I upgraded my OS. Nor would I go for the particular Auzentech X-Fi card also mentioned in this review. I might go for a different Auzentech one - just not something produced through association with a company that sold me a very expensive card so recently that became redundant so very quickly.

As a final note: I'm aware that there are very likely to be people who have upgraded to Vista, installed all the latest drivers, and who have had only good experiences with their X-Fi cards. It's only by reading their positive comments in forums on the Internet, I suspect, that an interested potential purchaser of this card might see it in a more positive light than I'm prepared to shed upon it based on my own impressions. Nobody would be more delighted than I to find that this last year has been a mere blip, and that after a few teething troubles, the Fatality is going to be as good in Vista after all as it has been in XP.

Go through that forum thoroughly and read up on this before making your buying decision. The price may have come down a little this year to between £111 and £143, but it's still a lot of money to spend on a sound card. For so much you might reasonably expect only good things. 

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