Does Creative’s EAX Reign Supreme?

For those who might have missed it, our resident audiophile, Rory Buszka, has posted an article that compares Creative’s native EAX to ASUS’ clone, called DS3D GX 2.0. Essentially, this article stemmed from a complaint that Creative sent their press release list which stated that ASUS was wrong in claiming that their Xonar cards supported their EAX technology, and technically speaking, that was correct.

I won’t get deep into the whys and hows here, since Rory took care of that in his article, but the goal was simple: Can ASUS’ GX 2.0 compare to native EAX? Would a casual gamer notice the difference? The results are somewhat surprising, because even though ASUS’ solution wasn’t perfect, it came amazingly close to actual EAX, minus the buggy drivers and all that nonsense.

Many posters in our forums have mentioned that we should have performed more testing, including performance, however, we should reiterate our goals. This was not a “Creative vs. The World” article, but rather a look at how the competition’s EAX “emulator” and general gaming audio stacked up against the reigning king. So check it out, especially if you are in the market for a new audio card.

While ASUS support of EAX 5.0 isn’t true “EAX” – they haven’t licensed anything from Creative – the DirectSound3D GX 2.0 extension set aims to free the positional 3D audio market from Creative’s grip by performing the same functions in EAX 5.0-enabled games, without the Vista compatibility issues of hardware-acceleration, and the half-baked ALchemy solution.

Source: Creative EAX vs. ASUS DS3D GX 2.0