I've been using Vista for sometime now. I like the sidebar. I like the large icons. I like many things about it. Indeed use Vista for six months and come back to XP. Hmmm... maybe Vista not so bad after all, hmmm?
-DirectSound 3D hardware acceleration is gone. This means that Creative's hardware engine for directsound no longer works like it did in XP. All sound now passes through the CPU, which once again for those of us who would prefer the CPU to do other tasks (and of course got something like an Audigy for the sole purpose of offloading audio from the CPU), this is a problem. Creative is working on support, however. They're releasing a new standard called OpenAL which bypasses the internal audio system of Vista and will output directly to the hardware. So right now any software that supports OpenAL will in fact output directly to the hardware bypassing this internal Windows system, but there's just not that much software that supports it yet
Ugh... please. You think audio processing actually takes up huge amounts of overhead? The stupid Creative drivers probably use more overhead than anything. Go look at the hardware requirements for the SB X-FI pro! Hmmm... 1GHz processor, 256MB of RAM. Huh? Isn't the SOUND HARDWARE supposed to be doing the work?
Really, in the end it doesn't matter what sound card you have. You don't really need one anymore either... since you can just use USB.
