Nvidia and Intel push “Visual Computing”…

Ξ April 11th, 2008 | → Comments Off | ∇ |

Because before now we were using punch-cards. Our paper bill was huge, but at least our arses were always clean. Someone introduce them to the GUI, please.

Creative – Nails in the coffin of its soundcards?

Ξ April 6th, 2008 | → Comments Off | ∇ |

It has not been a good fortnight for Creative and things started badly when Asus reverse engineered the “EAX 5 Advanced HD” into a new, free driver update for its Xonar soundcards, updating the DS3D GX engine to version 2.0. Asus basically spoofs the game engine into thinking it’s EAX 5 capable and tells it to send it the audio data, then it works with it the best it can using software emulation to output the spatial surround audio.

It’s not perfect as Phil O’Shaughnessy, Vice President of Corporate Communications at Creative Labs was quick to point out;

“With its recent driver updates, Asus is misleading its customers by suggesting that its sound cards now support EAX 5. Asus sound cards do not support EAX 5, nor do they support EAX 3 or EAX 4. There are a small number of PC game titles that specifically query the audio device on the system to see if EAX 5 is available before they will attempt to render more than 64 3D simultaneous audio voices. The new Asus drivers are falsely reporting EAX 5 capabilities in order to get these games to ouptut 3D audio on Asus sound cards.”

EAX 5 Advanced HD was the only jewel left in the X-Fi crown as far as many were concerned and now that the Xonar can emulate it (to what degree exactly is yet to be determined), in addition to pretty much every other Dolby and DTS option you can imagine, Creative must be seeing red.

This rush of blood to the head seems to have had an effect on some senior staff at Creative, who in a dash of sheer stupidity greed… stupidity (I can’t think of any other way to describe it) have stabbed in the back the lone knight they had working with them to develop drivers that actually work for their products.

To describe Creative’s driver support is legendary is an understatement – if the soundcard industry had been any less of a complete monopoly, Creative would have long been kicked into touch. While their hardware was always revolutionary at the time (the X-Fi is three years old this year) its drivers have been buggier than an article in “Entomology Today”.

The one man, Daniel Kawakami, (or Daniel_K,) making things right by fixing these drivers and adding functionality where Creative had purposely restricted it, was this week accused by Creative Labs’ Phil O’Shaughnessy (he’s had a stressful few weeks, it seems), as “stealing”;

“By enabling our technology and IP to run on sound cards for which it was not originally offered or intended, you are in effect, stealing our goods.”

The post is still there, yet it has been edited somewhat since the prior release. The first reply to it by “TrooperTom” sums up everyone’s feeling perfectly;

“My god, you guys got some balls on you, either that or you’re all borderline mad. He offered a service you guys can’t/wont, and in so made a lot of YOUR customers happy about their product again. Now you wanna wipe him out and keep him silent by threatening about legal actions. This is a beyond retarded, shame on you, shame on you.”

Creative’s main gripe against Daniel_K was that he was accepting donations on his site, for which he has apoligised after quoting himself having made comments like “the more people donate, the faster I’ll release” – to Creative this meant Daniel was receiving a wage for Creative’s proprietary work. However, Daniel claims that he used the money to buy hardware, namely a Live! 5.1 and Audigy SE card which came to a significant $75, and to date he claims to have only made $146 from donations – hardly an earth shattering figure.

Considering the time and effort Daniel put in and the fact it’s not the same as charging for drivers – something Creative was happy to do to Audigy users who wanted Vista support through its OpenAL converting Alchemy software – most would argue common sense has shot straight out the Window.

The current message posted on the Creative forum reads a little differently – while Creative spends three quarters of it saying it wants to work with third parties to develop drivers, it then says it won’t allow unauthorised distribution of the companies property. This is quite understandable given that unofficial drivers could possibly ruin a system and Creative could get the blame or worse, a lawsuit – the company is only protecting its own back and the usual EULA says that fiddling with them is a no-no.

However, if you read between the lines you can see that Creative doesn’t want others developing extended support for features outside of what it currently offers for older hardware, even if the hardware can run it because this stops Creative from selling soundcards. On one hand it’s protecting its business like all successful business’ do, but on the other it just pisses off the community of users who have hardware already “capable” – it’s not like a graphics card or CPU which becomes superseded by faster hardware. In fact, Creative openly admits it cripples some cards,

“If we choose to develop and provide host-based processing features with certain sound cards and not others, that is a business decision that only we have the right to make.”

And no doubt people have a right to shop elsewhere too.

The hacks/unlocks Daniel made were quite substantial:

• he enabled the software base X-Fi Crystaliser on Audigy cards,
• he unlocked the paid for Alchemy drivers to work on all cards,
• he unlocked the purposely disabled DTS and Dolby decoding feature on Audigy cards when Vista was detected
• he unlocked the purposely disabled CMSS2 and Stereo Surround on Audigy cards in Vista, when only CMSS was available
• He unlocked the Advanced EQ and Special FX presents on Audigy cards in Vista
• He unlocked the DVD Audio function on Audigy cards in Vista
• He wrote a small utility that gave the option of using the hardware MIDI Synth on Audigy cards in Vista
• He fixed some drivers bugs and created present saving within the Equaliser function on Audigy cards in Vista
• He also enabled or claims to have improved WaveRT, a Microsoft replacement for ASIO for both X-Fi and Audigy cards in Vista (although he admits it’s untested)
• He got Dolby Digital Live to work on X-Fi cards,
• He removed a “purposeful” bug where much older Live!/Live! 5.1 cards would distort sound in Vista.
• He added features and enabled Alchemy for Live! cards in Vista

The list goes on and on - you can read Daniel’s explanation of his work here.

What’s the biggest kicker? He claims to not even own an X-Fi! And if Creative didn’t charge for the Alchemy Audigy drivers from the outset, he would likely never have started these work arounds in the first place.

Asus is all too happy to take up the slack and with the recent release of the Xonar DX – a low profile, inexpensive PCI-Express x1 version of the full fat D2X that still supports all manner of Dolby and DTS features and still includes some high quality processing hardware on board at a claimed 116dB SNR. It should retail for under $90 States side, but we’re yet to hear of a UK price just yet although we expect it to compete directly with the Creative X-Fi XtremeGamer.

While Asus’ drivers were a little sketchy when we first looked at the Xonar in the middle of last year, by the time the PCI-Express D2X was released we didn’t have a single problem with stability or feature support – the only sour taste was from the appalling interface design.

If you’re still wanting some D-K drivers you can share them here or get what’s left directly from here. You can also read other emails from Daniel about the situation here.

Kayne and Lynch is actually not bad, as long as you Co-op.

Ξ March 12th, 2008 | → Comments Off | ∇ |

More games should feature two player co-op. Either single player or extra missions - going back, while at Uni my housemate and I played the Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory co-op missions together on the original Xbox. It was so much fun, especially when things got a bit lad-ish and we raced each other to the exit, punching each other over ledges instead of assisting the other out of windows.

While Gears of War was tons of fun, Kayne and Lynch doesn’t quite match this as it’s fraught with gameplay problems and continual bugs, however there’s still something entertaining for two people to sit there and shout at the screen.

We’d do Halo 3 co-op, but as a gamerpoint whore there’s no benefit for me to replay this. I just can’t really face it either, it’s like playing the same fucking level/game over and over again. There’s too many other (better) 360 games to spend (waste) my time on.
Army of Two looks entertaining though and yet another co-op to fill our current gaming requirement. Although, apologies in advance for my anticipated and continual swearing, Hiren.

Xbox 360 + Richard = Leading Smacktalking Motherfucker.

You don’t want to play online with me, I go to the effort of making up new insults.

Does anyone give a shit about “extreme overclocking” at trade shows anymore?

Ξ March 6th, 2008 | → Comments Off | ∇ |

Honestly, the number of “broken records” and liquid nitrogen being thrown about is just a boring and pointless yawn-fest. I suppose it’s always a crowd puller but no journalist will care. Save it for the days when the unwashed frequent the floor, please.
Watch it once and it’s cool, watch it for the nth time and it’s just like watching your wheatabix go soggy in its milk.

3DMark, CPU, memory hoo har, yawn…

Corsair TX750, Thermaltake QFan and Enermax Pro 82+… yes, more PSUs

Ξ February 17th, 2008 | → 0 Comments | ∇ |

I dropped in on Enermax again last Friday with a load more power supplies - specifically interesting was the Corsair TX750 which turned out really well, as expected, although the VX550 wasn’t as good. I still have to look at the results in greater depth though to be sure.

The new Enermax Modu 82+ and Pro 82+ were seriously awesome. Clearly the guys there were psyched (well, as much as you can be over a power supply) about the new models that replace the liberty and noisetaker ranges. About time too to be honest.

Despite the quite crap name, they genuinely are 82-85 percent efficient across the whole range with awesome rail quality. The modular cables on the Modu model have fantastic connectors too but from what I hear the price might be a show stopper. It’s all well and good charging a premium for an awesome product, but this is the mainstream market and what Enermax were quoting was just ridiculous - they better sort it out before the CeBit launch.

Surprisingly the Thermaltake Qfan 650W was actually quite good, but a lot noisier than the Enermax at high load. The 1500W model is a POS though - it got too hot to touch and we only loaded it to 80 percent of its full capacity. Thermaltake really need to stop this BS e-peen wattage ramping because it’s destroying its brand. It still needs to employ a designer for its cases too - not a 6 year old with a crayon.

On the subject of crap products, I really feel sorry for Sapphire - PCAM2RD790 is just not a board worth buying. The DFI side of things is solid, but it just needs to have more effort from Sapphire. Rebranding just doesn’t work any more. I feel sorry for Bill too - he said the board will be £150 yet CCL seem to have decided £170+ is better. Why the hell would you pay that when you can get an MSI K9A2 Platinum for £115?

As usual, I’ve still got a fuck ton to do at work - there’s a load of features pending that I’m just not going to finish before CeBit. Truth is, I’m not entirely looking forward to CeBit - 18hr days for 4 days is not my idea of fun, even if this year I should actually know people there. Computex is far better - smaller, better press rooms, better food and it’s not shoved out in the middle of nowhere.

Next week should be the Gigabyte Energy Efficient P35 mobo which looks surprisingly good, although there is at least one crippling layout issue the software side of things looks impressive.

To come…

Ξ January 12th, 2008 | → 0 Comments | ∇ |

Yay I’ve not only got to move into a new place in two weeks but we’ve got to move offices next month as well, that’ll be a laugh, hopefully we can find somewhere as nice as we have now. It’s going to be good though - because we can start a fresh on the tidiness of the labs, rather than have it always look like a bombs hit it. I’ll be missing the diversity of kit we see from TR though, as well as the guys there (of course).

Well, so far this week I’ve managed to kill a Sapphire board (I still maintain it had a bad BIOS chip to start with), a Seagate hard drive is on its way out (SMART errors started a Christmas though) and our Black Edition Phenom might not even do 2.5GHz - I have to play some more on that one too. I’ve also found my beloved ThermalRight eXtreme doesn’t even fit with the AMD boards I wanted to OC on - it easily conflicts with the memory and you can’t turn it 90 degrees! Bah!
We’ve got a ton of stuff still to come this month and I haven’t even started my HTPC mobo article and Energy Efficient motherboards, let alone go back up to test some more PSUs. *sigh* Although I am starting to run out of stuff for a change, rather than barely keeping my head above the hardware.

Thank You For Ruining My World, Creative

Ξ January 7th, 2008 | → 0 Comments | ∇ |

I just got this press release through and the title states:

CREATIVE INTRODUCES THE ZEN STONE AND ZEN STONE PLUS, WITH BUILT-IN SPEAKERS: MICRO BOOM BOXES THAT FREE PEOPLE FROM HEADPHONES.

I can’t stand companies that further destroy society, now I have to listen to some cock’s music on the train with his new Zen piping out some shit through pissy speakers.

Creative, I honestly can’t thank you enough. Didn’t you ever stop to think that Headphones were made for a reason?!

It may free some, but it enslaves others.

Cats Are Freakin’ Geniuses

Ξ December 26th, 2007 | → 0 Comments | ∇ |

So my parents cats sit opposite each other on the floor after an exhausting play session and just lay there hitting a cotton reel between them. Back and forth, back and forth, moving only the single arm each this thing rolls about two foot exactly from paw to paw.

Absolute. Genius.

Wish I had a video camera because it would have been an absolute youtube moment.

Naturally they got bored after about 2 minutes and promptly jumped on each other again.

If I ever see another PSU again…

Ξ July 7th, 2007 | → 0 Comments | ∇ |

It’ll be too soon. A whole WEEK writing about things that power other things drives a man insane.

Oh wait, what? Another group test in a couple of weeks?

Shit.

Cracked Cartilages Hurt

Ξ May 29th, 2007 | → 0 Comments | ∇ |

Was doing a downhill trail on my bike at the weekend when I hit a log and decided I could fly. Now my knee cap is about twice the size it should be thanks to the cartilage fluid surrounding it. You can’t really see from the very poor camera phone photo, but it’s bruised all around the edges.

My bike seems to have survived better than myself, apart from a bit more buckling in the wheels.

I’ve spent two days on crutches and I can almost walk now, finally, although I’m trying to stay off it as much as possible because I’ll be putting in the miles at Computex next week, and could really do with two functioning legs for it.
What annoys me more is my DAY OLD Nokia 6300 is now cracked since I landed on it. ffs.