I hate Creative Labs, what are my other choices?

[Navaros]

Today I was looking at the Creative Labs site. I have an SB Live! card and I was going to update my drivers due to the voices being really low volume in GTA 3 (but that's another story, crappy coding, a horrible port of a good game, I'sa gonna try to return it tomorrow). I look at the Drivers for SB Live! on the official Creative Site and the most recent one is from 05/2000. WTF????!!!! They were *selling* SB Live as their top-of-the-line sound card until very, very recently (only this year, I believe) when the Audigy crap came out, and the most recent driver update was way back in 2000? That *really* gets me mad!

So for those of you who know a lot about the sound card industry, I must ask: do you know of any alternatives to Creative Labs where I can can get all the bells and whistles of EAX 3 etc. but also buy from a company who always *supports* their products???

[Terror]

hmmm those sound problems are not related to the drivers i think... i haven't updated my drivers for a while and i too have a SB live! card. Perhaps your processor may be the problem... if the game is not working too well than the sound may also sound a bit glitchy. I'm not an expert on this but as far as I know anyone who has gta3 has an SB live and they don't have any sound glitches.

Otherwise try looking for help on the gta3 site

[TMA_1]

actually nav is right. creative labs has probably the worst driver support on the planet. There are so many glitches. and sb always helps us with new drivers every thousand years.lolI have to modify this because a great alternative is actually a turtle beach brand sound card. Also if you get a good motherboard thats new. The intagrated soundcards now days are awesome. Almost as good as the audigy. if not at times better. If you want to

[Gerf]

You could always try a Videologic or Hercules brand. Apparently the support for both of them is very good.

I have a SB Live sound card aswell, and my drivers haven't been updated for around 2 years! creative have probably abandoned this card in favour of the new audigy stuff

[Nyarlathotep]

What OS do you have and what site did you look on ?

For XP their latest driver for the SB Live is dated 7/17/2002.

As for Win ME (what I'm running), they have outdated drivers, but to be honest, I have yet to find a game that gives me sound problems (and I do have many games)..

[gryphon]

About the same here. No problems with games and sound. [ expect for Dune 1 ] Even with those outdated drivers.Infact, together with my Matrox the Creative driver was the only thing of wich the drivers where directly accepted by 2K ADV. I was bloddy thankfull for that considering the latest logitech drivers wern't supported, just as my socalled "plug and pray" monitor. Even the darn disk didn't help.Don't forget SB's have full Linux compatebilety.The date of the drivers doesn't matter. As long as they work.There is always Terratec. And the new A-open MOBO AX4B-533Tube, with what the name suggests it has "tube powered onboard sound".

[Frodo]

I have a Turtle Beach Santa Cruz and that works excellent.

[Navaros]

I am not very technically inclined. The *only* game of many that I have a problem with is GTA 3. The problem is that the voices of the guys who give you missions (Luigi, Joey, Tony etc.) are at about 20% of the volume of everything else. I can barely hear them unless I manually jack up my speaker volume about 80% before each mission briefing. I have my Play Control Panel settings all maxed-out. It does not matter which In-game sound option I set it to. The problem persists with all of them.I call Take 2 Tech Support, and the lady says: "you need drivers that are DirectX 8.1 compliant and there is no way that a driver released in 2000 would be since DirectX 8.1 just came out."I don't know if she was just feeding me a crock of crap or what. I didn't like spending real cash to call them long distance only to be given generic BS answers that are already on their website like "get the latest drivers for your sound card". If anyone knows what is causing this problem that would be most appreciated, if I can't fix it I'll be forced to try and return GTA 3 because without having the voices play at the same level as everything else, it's just no fun.Here are my specs:Windows 98 SEP3 866mHzGeForce 4 Ti 4600SB Live512 MB SDRAMIntel D815EEA MB (Not that it's relevant)

[Gobalopper]

I have the Santa Cruz as well and it works fine in GTA3. I'm never buying another SB card unless I am forced to.

[gryphon]

and there is no way that a driver released in 2000 would be since DirectX 8.1 just came out.

As far as I know it can be. ..

A simplified example, a piece of hardware that's Win'95 compliant can also be Win2K compliant. even if the thing is 4 years old. It doesn't have to but it can be.

But again, I'm not really shure but I think this counts for software / drivers to.

[vidiware]

well i dont think there are many other sound choises? but msi and asus maybe produces some sound cards

[Nyarlathotep]

Nav, try this site..

[Terror]

hmmm..... can't voices volume be raised in the options menu? ah well... gta 3 isn't that great anyway :).. it's fun to get rid of your anger but it's not an addicting game :)

[gryphon]

I liked the small review in Edge [ English games magazine ] in last months issue.

In short, "GTA3 isn't even like reality. If it was you should be using protection [ when getting your health back from "public woman" ]. If you don't you should see your health go down verry slowly until th einevetable end comes . ...Game over !"

[ btw. Gobalopper, this Dutch language thingy is really weird ... :) ]

[Razorox]

I have the exact same sound card as you nav. I'm running windows 2000 professional with most updated drivers, and the card works great. No gripes whatsoever.