The hurdles

As we mentioned in our introduction, there are a number of hurdles currently facing Creative Labs as we hurtle through 2007, from both the introduction of Windows Vista and what it means for PC audio, to the sound board market in general.  Let's begin by talking about some of those issues, and how they impact Creative.

Windows Vista: The 'end' of EAX

Ever since swallowing up Aureal and their A3D API many years ago, Creative Labs' primary claim to fame amongst the gaming community was their ever evolving EAX functionality, offering more and more intricate environmental audio effects in the latest games right the way up the X-Fi, which holds 64MB of 'X-RAM' in certain iterations to further accelerate and improve in-game audio quality.

However, the introduction of Windows Vista, and the driver model changes which come with it, have brought the future of EAX via DirectSound to a grinding halt.  To understand the technical reasoning for this, we need first to look at the Windows audio architecture circa Windows XP.

The important part of this diagram to note at this juncture (aside from both ASIO and OpenAL, which have a direct path to the Hardware Abstraction Layer, as close to direct hardware access as you can get in Windows' NT-based architecture) is that as well as access to the audio driver via Windows' kernel mixer, DirectSound can also directly access the driver - It is this functionality that allowed for the hardware acceleration of 3D audio and its related effects, such as EAX.

As of Windows Vista, this more direct route to the hardware is no longer available to DirectSound and EAX, which basically leaves this functionality high and dry in existing titles aside from emulation using another API such as OpenAL.  The basis of Windows Vista is that requests by applications to communicate with audio hardware are done via 'sessions' using Microsoft's Windows Audio Session API, which then goes on to ensure that the vast majority of audio processing runs in user rather then kernel space.  The aforementioned kernel mixer is also gone, with only a small Microsoft driver actually capable of running in kernel mode as far as the audio stack goes.  Microsoft's reason behind this is largely to improve stability, as the removal of most of the kernel-level processing greatly reduces the chances of BSOD's and drivers or software causing severe failures of parts of the OS.  As well as this, our friend Digital Rights Management has a part to play in these alterations, helping to ensure that a protected audio content stream cannot be 'hijacked' by another device or application.

Although DirectSound for environmental audio is dead and buried circa Windows Vista, all is not lost, for other proprietary APIs such as ASIO (vital for professionals who work with audio) and OpenAL still have the required access to hardware to do what is expected of them.  OpenAL is, theoretically, an open source API in the same way that OpenGL is for graphics, although at this present time Creative Labs are virtually the only company to show any interest in developing and working with the API on any real level. 

However, this theoretical openness could open the door to more competition for Creative - Unlike EAX via DirectSound which was a Creative owned technology from the very start, which could thus be controlled by Creative as they saw fit (which is why we've never seen anything beyond EAX 2.0 support from rival manufacturers), anybody can theoretically pop up and sport the whole gamut of OpenAL features.  Is this likely to happen any time soon?  Most likely not, but the threat is more certainly there, and the stakes even larger now OpenAL is the only real option for positional audio under Windows Vista.

In addition to this, Microsoft have also been making noises at this year's Game Developers Conference regarding what they have dubbed 'XAudio2', a cross-platform audio API for both the PC and Xbox360.  Given the success of Direct3D in the video arena, and Microsoft pushing hard to bring Xbox 360 and Windows-based games closer together, it would be foolish to bet against such an API gaining traction, and possibly bringing interest from parties other than Creative with it.

New levels of competition

Talking of competition, not since they despatched of Aureal have Creative seen so many rivals willing to take a bite out of various segments of its market share, and succeeding to do so at that.  Although, as we've already covered, most of these rivals have shown little or no interest in catering specifically toward gamers, they have raised their game in many other ways, introducing features as yet unavailable on Creative's own products.

While non-Creative Labs discrete sound cards had a history of being cheap and cheerful in the past, the boards of today are both priced directly against Creative's offerings, and with rich feature sets to boot.  Real-time encoding of Dolby Digital and DTS signals has been the particularly big selling point for such parts - Functionality that has been highly desirable since it first saw the light of day since NVIDIA's SoundStorm MCP, and is still yet to make its way into even Creative Labs' X-Fi boards.

On top of this, the quality of both the components and chips used by rival companies such as Auzentech have put them on a par, and even ahead of, Creative's latest products when it comes to sound quality and reproduction.  Indeed, Auzentech in particular are a good example of a company who are tempting the true audiophile market with their offerings, pulling in users who would traditionally have looked to Creative for high quality audio for their fix.

This trend of increasing competition is showing no signs of abating - Indeed, the market is looking to become significantly more crowded as time goes on.  Aside from the numerous firms currently employing C-Media's Oxygen HD chip to create discrete sound boards, CeBIT has revealed the intent of manufacturing giant ASUS to enter the sound card market with their own high-end board - Sporting a PCI Express 1x interface no less, another market that Creative has failed to enter at the time of writing.

Creative's market share may even be under attack from AMD, with rumours that their next-generation RV6x0 parts will feature an audio processor of sorts, as well as their Torrenza concept which allows for additional processors to be plugged in alongside a traditional CPU - Could we see a Torrenza compatible audio processor emerge at some stage? 

HDMI

Although its uptake in the PC market has been slow thus far, HDMI poses another potential threat to discrete sound board manufacturers.  After so many generations of handling audio and video output separately, on both computers and home entertainment devices, HDMI combines the two thanks to its ability to carry both audio and video.

At present, this has posed little issue, with the few graphics boards manufacturers who have opted to add an HDMI interface to their parts opting to pass the audio signal through from the PC's sound device to the graphics board before pushing it out via the HDMI output.  However, as we just mentioned, rumours are surfacing that AMD's RV6x0 may well feature their own audio processor - A sensible move quite possibly, seeing as the company looks likely to be heavily promoting HDMI functionality on this range of boards, as they have with their recent 690 chipset (which relies on audio being passed through from another source, incidentally).  With AMD taking this lead, how long before we see other GPU manufacturers such as NVIDIA and Intel opting to take a similar road?  If HDMI truly takes off as it potentially threatens to, then it could spell doom for discrete sound cards in general.

Apathy towards discrete sound

Finally, here's the big one - Most people simply don't care about discrete sound any more.  Although still far from brilliant, most on-board sound solutions now support multi-channel 'HD' audio, and work 'well enough' for the vast majority of PC owners not to be concerned about shelling out on a discrete sound board.  Indeed, we are now seeing some on-board solutions offering up optical inputs and real-time Dolby Digital encoding via Dolby Digital Live.  This leaves such solutions only lacking in 3D audio performance - An issue that has become far less important due to the ever increasing speed of CPUs and systems in general, which negates much of this problem, particularly for gamers who are more often than not GPU rather than CPU limited.

Don't believe me that there's apathy towards discrete sound boards?  While it may not be entirely scientific, simply check out the latest numbers from Valve's hardware survey run through Steam.

Realtek's ageing AC97 on-board solutions make up over 25% of Steam users who participated in the survey's audio processor, with the top seven also made up almost entirely of on-board parts.  Only in seventh place do we find a trace of a Creative product, courtesy of another rather old part - The Audigy 2 ZS.  In fairness to the SoundBlaster X-Fi, it comes in eight, but with just 2.5% of users from the survey behind it.  Hardly statistics to set the accountants pulse racing.