Not long ago, we received word from ASUS that they had managed to incorporate EAX effects into the drivers of their Xonar cards. Soon afterward, Creative told everyone that was false, and that ASUS "EAX" was not true EAX. Who's telling the straight story, and will you even notice a difference? This article seeks to answer one question - Are you likely to notice a difference between ASUS' DS3D GX 2.0 and Creative's EAX Advanced HD?

In the three games I tested, I found that while EAX effects on the Creative X-Fi had a slight edge in sound quality when compared to the Xonar, it was hardly a night-and-day difference. The strange artifacts I heard under BioShock were likely due to the fact that I was using a patched driver to conduct the tests - ASUS sent me an updated file to be included in the driver installation that would allow EAX to be enabled within BioShock. It's clear that the Xonar drivers and ASUS' DS3D GX extension set both need a bit more work to bring them up to the level of Creative's hardware-based DSP, but the success of the ASUS card under both BioShock and Prey definitely proves that software-based DSP effects are coming of age.

The significance of the testing and conclusions detailed in the preceding three pages is thus: While ASUS hasn't managed to de-throne the X-Fi's hardware-accelerated EAX environmental and positional audio effects where sound quality is concerned, they've come extremely close, and have managed to duplicate much of the functionality of EAX 5 to boot. In fact, as far as practical conclusions are concerned, in most games you're not even likely to notice a difference, and if you do, it's a slight one at that. There was also no perceptible effect on smoothness of gameplay when using the ASUS Xonar sound card, despite the fact that my 'reference' rig might have been cutting edge, oh, say, a couple years ago (with the exception of the video and audio subsystems).

In other news, HardwareSecrets has posted a guide called "How to Use the SPDIF Output from Sound Blaster X-Fi Sound Cards".