Since the fiasco over Creative's unethical treatment of a third-party programmer, I've been on the lookout for suitable replacements to the X-Fi audio cards for myself and my group of gaming friends. We're not looking to dump the cards we have, but we've all bought new PCs lately so there has been opportunity to make new choices.

My must-have criteria:

• Good signal-to-noise ratio. - Specs aside, I listen for this. Crank the volume, I don't want to hear background static.
• Hardware channels and/or effects. - Software audio takes more CPU horsepower than most people think. It's not night/day like graphics hardware, but saved cycles still equate to better framerates. Also, software audio often gets a low priority resulting in crackling audio, which I don't want to hear, ever.
• Upmixing to 5.1 - Hardware upmixing is strongly preferred. Most games have surround settings anyway, but I do tend to run Winamp whilst playing games and upmixing without taxing my system is a big plus.

I'd have thought these features would be important to most gamers and audiophiles, but oddly the status-quo = crappy software sound via onboard outputs. I can count the manufacturers of suitable audio cards on just one hand. Below are the choices I've found:

• Creative X-Fi - Any model of the cards with the actual X-Fi chipset are honestly fantastic cards that meet all three of my criteria bang-on. Be careful though, Creative does a nasty switcheroo with the lowend cards and labels X-Fi onto budget cards that actually contain Audigy chipsets (So avoid the "Xtreme Audio" and stick with the "Xtreme Gamer" or better).
• Auzentech X-Fi Prelude - X-Fi in the name and you guessed it, Auzentech is using Creative's chipset, the software appears to be the same too. This is essentially a premium version though, with gold-plated connectors and the quality many expect from Auzentech. Unless I'm mistaken, it's also a fully 24bit version of the X-Fi, which definitely puts it above Creative's. I'm curious to directly compare this card with the X-Fi Xtreme Gamer that I own, but it does also come with a bigger pricetag.
• ASUS Xonar - At first the Xonar looked like a contender to the X-Fi. The Xonar cards have great signal-to-noise specs, plus the benefit of Linux drivers on the near horizon (who knows how long Creative will take on that). ... But... it turns out the Xonar uses a C-Media chipset that is software driven, which is hugely disappointing, especially considering the premium price on these cards. Such a shame, since the light-up connectors are hella cool and I love ASUS.

I sure hope Creative comes to their senses and simply opens up their drivers, for the sake of any OS aside from XP. Right now, as far as I'm concerned, the X-Fi cards are the only quality choice. No matter what evil Creative's legal and driver departments get themselves into, they are essentially the only company that's still supporting the gamer market with real hardware audio.

If you really want to support the competition, I'd say go with Auzentech and get the same (or better) quality while giving a few less coins to Creative.

I just couldn't resist this: Boycott crappy onboard sound.

Ahh these are starting to catch on, we've got our little circle jerk of competitors hammering away at these tunes via Audiosurf.

Since The Real McKenzies were so popular amongst our group for the previous challenge, I'm gonna throw in another one of theirs from that same album.

• The Real McKenzies - 10,000 Shots
• The Used - The Bird and the Worm
• Smokie - Who the Fuck is Alice?

Have you ever been a non-fan of a group and then suddenly they release a song that just grabs you anyway. I have to grudgedly admit I love The Bird and the Worm from The Used, I can't stop humming it and the lyrical imagery gets me too.

"Who the Fuck is Alice?" was one of those accidental remixes that brought life back to a long forgotten tune (read the related Wikipedia article), in this case from glam rockers Smokie whom I usually mistake for Slade. Either way, it's an amusing ditty.

I'll toss up the scoreboards later this week, meanwhile go ahead and strain your fingers beating my scores on these. =)

I recently installed the latest beta drivers from Nvidia and there's a noticeable performance boost on my GeForce 7600 (DX9 Windows XP). I thought I might mention the drivers in case others here are interested, although I'm sure your nifty new 8800 GT is running along nicely as it is. ;)

Supported for these drivers are GeForce FX, 6, 7, 8, and 9 series cards / chipsets: Head to Nvidia's page for release v174.74 beta.

Update: Audiosurf's scoreboard database seems to be restored and back to normal. Yay!

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I've just discovered that the Audiosurf-Tools scoreboard signatures app can provide us with ongoing tracking of our Audiosurf challenge songs. Here's the running with our current challenge set:

Green = Casual Scores.
Red = Pro Scores.
Blue = Elite Scores.

The Real McKenzies - Pour Decisions:

Black Mountain - Evil Ways:

The Darkest of the Hillside Thickets - Big Robot Dinosaur:

As you can see, our little competitive crew is dominating these tunes, but then they are from local artists.

Valve has grabbed another important deal, Assassin's Creed will launch on Steam.

I've just placed my pre-order with glee. I'm a fan of the stalk-action genre, games like Thief and Hitman are among the few single-player games that I consider to have substantial replay value.

When I saw the pre-order banner for Assassin's Creed on Steam yesterday, I almost thought it was an April Fool's joke. The trend lately has been for big title games to release first via boxed Windows Live / Games for Windows retail versions and maybe arrive on Steam later.

I was this close to placing an order at EB for the boxed version, but not quite. Like Gears of War, it was almost enough game to push me over, but the combination of steep minimum requirements, expectations of intrusive copy-protection and the pre-mentioned Windows Live thing held me back. Steam to the rescue!

This is the current make-or-break game for PC gaming, there aren't a lot of big-name games in its wake. It broke sales expectations on the Xbox 360. I'm hoping that it wakes up some dormant PC gamers, because it should be a stellar game to highlight all those new videocards.

I just noticed via the Steam survey that Nvidia's GeForce 8800 is now the top graphics chipset, at least amongst the gamer crowd.

Virtually all of my friends have upgraded to GeForce 8800 graphics cards in either the GT, GTS or GTX versions. The newer version of the chipset with the current GT and GTS has the best price-performance ratio that we've seen in years, arguably surpassing the more expensive GTX cards left over from last year. These are exceptionally capable cards.

Nvidia's 9x00 cards by comparison haven't been leaps and bounds ahead, but I think Nvidia intends to position the 9 series towards the integrated market once they refine the architecture more. We'll see, directions can change depending on the competition.

It looks like the 8800 GT card will be running PC games for a long while.

While I don't have the technical expertise of John Carmack or David Kirk, I'm going to try to apply some gamer commonsense to the debate over Ray Tracing versus Raster graphics for PC games.

Ray Tracing in simple terms

Ray Tracing isn't new, it's used for most of the animated 3D stuff we watch in movies or on TV. The basic idea is simple, create realistic images by calculating each beam of light, how it bounces off 3D objects, reflecting colours and texture.

Think of how slow it must be to calculate every light beam. It's amazing that we can generate detailed images this way, but it's not fast, an enormous amount of computing power went into every 1/24th of a second frame in Ratatouille. Photorealistic ray tracing doesn't happen in real-time, not yet at least and I'd bet not in the near future either.

In contrast, games currently employ a bag of rasterization tricks to simulate 3D environments. I'll inadequately apply the analogy of cardboard movie sets to raster graphics, where the games prop up prepainted walls and then apply special effects here and there. It generally works and the audience isn't usually aware of the how or why.

Both technologies are dependant on polygons to structure the 3D shapes, so they will have some of the same limitations in visual quality. It's more about the lighting than anything else.

From Intel?

Intel is selling Ray Tracing as snake oil, mark my words.

Intel has been successful at a lot of things, but quality 3D graphics cards / chipsets are not one of them. Oh sure, they make a profit with their integrated graphics, but they do so by selling absolutely useless junk to the masses that's utterly incapable of playing current games. I'm using strong rhetoric here, but I don't think I'm overstating at all.

I just cannot fathom Intel bringing about a new revolution within this industry with the way they've been so readily producing garbage chipsets. Tim Sweeney is right, he opened my eyes to this fact: Intel is the most responsible for the "death" of PC gaming.

It's coming to DirectX 11

From what I've heard, it doesn't take much for Microsoft to rubberstamp something into the DirectX API, especially from an affluent partner like Intel. It doesn't mean it will get used by game developers, or even supported by the graphics hardware other than Intel's. Besides, DirectX on the PC is losing its relevance along with PC games market, so why bother looking ahead at DX11?

We're far more likely to see ray casting hybrids for games, but even then the incentive for developers isn't very high because there won't be revolutionary changes in visuals or framerate.