Im Oktober des vergangenen Jahres berichteten wir über teilweise erhebliche Probleme, die beim Einsatz von Soundkarten aus Creative Labs Soundblaster X-Fi Serie auf Mainboards mit NVIDIAs nForce4 Chipsatz auftreten.
Während diverse Mainboard-Hersteller zur Beseitigung der Probleme BIOS-Updates für die entsprechenden Mainboards in Aussicht stellten, bemühte sich auf der anderen Seite Creative Labs, betroffenen Kunden mit Firmware-Updates für die entsprechenden X-Fi Modelle zu helfen (wir berichteten).
NGOHQ.com, die damals als eine der ersten Webseiten über das Thema berichteten, hat sich vor kurzem, über ein halbes Jahr nach Bekanntwerden der X-Fi Probleme, angeschaut, wie sich die Dinge in der Zwischenzeit entwickelt haben und zieht dabei ein sehr negatives Fazit. Demnach haben nur wenige Mainboard-Hersteller tatsächlich mit einem BIOS-Update auf die Fehler reagiert, viele X-Fi Besitzer haben nachwievor große Probleme, auch mit neueren Firmware-Versionen. In manchen Fällen soll die neue, von Creative Labs bereitgestellte Firmware sogar X-Fi Karten unbrauchbar gemacht haben, ob dies evtl. auf Anwendungsfehler zurückzuführen ist, können wir natürlich nicht nachvollziehen.
After Creative released their new X-Fi lineup many users complained about the following issues:
Popping and crackling noises.
Incompatibilities with nForce3/4 based motherboards.
Blue screen of death.
Hard lockups and strange behavior.
The media around the world already covered it and revealed all these issues many months ago. Creative even confirmed some of these issues. Today after many months, we did a little research to find out what has happened since then. We found out that only a few manufacturers have released BIOS updates to solve some of these issues. Creative has made a mysterious firmware upgrade that cannot be found on their website, and some users claimed it killed their card. According to users in their forums, most of the effected consumers are STILL having issues with the X-Fi series. Just look at how many results you get when you search for “X-Fi issues” in google.
NGOHQ.com beklagt vor allem, dass Creative Labs auch nach so langer Zeit offenbar nicht in der Lage ist, die bekannten und teilweise auch von Creative Labs bestätigten Probleme zu beheben. Zudem kritisiert man den Support, speziell die Bereitstellung neuer und fehlerbereinigter Software-Updates. Das letzte offizielle Treiberpaket für Creative Labs X-Fi Serie wurde im November 2005 veröffentlicht (wir berichteten).
Da der Unmut vieler Soundblaster X-Fi Besitzer offenbar sehr groß ist, hat einer der Betroffenen nun eine an Creative Labs gerichtete Online-Petition aus der Taufe gehoben, die die diversen Missstände anspricht und Creative Labs auffordert, diese aus der Welt zu schaffen.
As Creative customers We, the undersigned demand:
Immediate fix for crackling and popping on X-Fi sound cards. It have been ten months and still, there is no fix or any statement about work progress from Your company.
Immediate fix for Creative Entertainment Center. We demand more than just one, outdated 800x600 resolution which makes everything look unacceptable, mainly on every modern LCD monitor.
Immediate cleanup in X-Fi software. We demand Creative to make it's software less bloated, Mode Console themes to be built on anything else than uncompressed BMP files, Mode Console Audio test files to be compressed (not bloated WAV files), unnecesary processes to be gone, all consoles to be more responsive (especially Entertainment and Audio Creation Consoles).
Immediate release of a new version of Entertainment Console with access to all the tabs from all of them, not just from main Menu-Tab. Actual Entertainment Mode Console design is not ergonomic and we simply don't like it this way.
Immediate release of any Creative supported tool for fast and unlagged autoswitching X-Fi Modes or: TOTAL ABANDONMENT of Three Mode Setup idea and taking us back to the XXI century where all other sound cards and even onboard audio doesn't force users to loose some features to get other features work. We ask Creative: Why "The most powerful Audio processor in the world" can't offer us all of it's features simultaneously like all it's predecessors did and like all other sound cards do? The X-Fi processor is supposed to be "The most powerful audio processor in the world" (as advertised on the X-Fi boxes!) doesn't even offer a hardware Dolby Digital 5.1 Encoder while a lot of competition sound cards, even the cheaper ones do and even though none of them doesn't have feature sets to switch.
Immediate fix for all known driver bugs. We do understand that are a lot of bugs to be fixed, but we also do know that it have been seven months since the last driver release and a lot of those bugs should be fixed by now.
Aufgrund der zahlreichen kritischen Stimmen, sieht sich Creative Labs nun offenbar dazu veranlasst, sich zu dem Thema öffentlich zu äußern. Wie Franco De Bonis ("Creative's European Audio Business Manager") gegenüber dem Inquirer verlauten lies, wird Creative Labs im technischen Support-Forum ausführlich zu den Problemen Stellung nehmen. Dort existiert bereits ein umfassendes Posting, das sich in Erklärungen für die Probleme versucht.
So now to our findings: We believe that the larger volume of data being requested is, in some systems, causing larger access delays to system memory, especially when Sound Blaster X-Fi is sharing memory access with high-end graphics and/or hard drives. We have found that with certain high-end systems and configurations, Sound Blaster X-Fi is being held off from receiving data from the PCI bus for significant periods of time, in some cases for close to two-thirds of a millisecond. This causes our audio buffers to underflow, which produces crackling sounds. The obvious answer to this would be to increase the latency tolerance, but due to the requirement for audio to synchronize accurately with graphics, we cannot increase the latency tolerance beyond a certain point.
Our tests have proved that in many cases these problems can be remedied with a simple BIOS update but this did not resolve the issues for all customers experiencing the issues. We therefore continued to investigate and have made a significant finding. In some systems we have resolved the issues by setting the motherboards to dual-channel memory mode to improve the memory bandwidth and response. Below you can see the configuration of two of the systems that we initially experienced issues with and subsequently resolved by setting to dual-channel memory mode.
Wie aus diesem Statement in Creatives Support-Forum hervorgeht, arbeite man derzeit intensiv mit diversen Mainboard und Chipsatzherstellern wie NVIDIA daran, die Probleme zu beseitigen. Dabei suche man Wege, die Bedürfnisse eines Systems und der jeweiligen Komponenten, einschließlich der Soundkarte, vernünftig auszubalancieren, um einen störungsfreien und optimalen Betrieb zu gewährleisten. Man wolle innerhalb der nächsten zwei Wochen an gleicher Stelle über die dann hoffentlich erzielten Fortschritte berichten.
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