TeAM YYePG

TECH
>
HEAR IT!
CHECK OUT
THE DEMO
ON THIS
MONTH’S
DVD
Remember when 3D cards were just coming out and you’d read about them and become mildly interested—right up until you saw
GLQuake in action and that mild interest immediately morphed into burning desire? A few months back, we were that excited about
the prospect of a separate CPU handling superrealistic physics. Now we have a new obsession. We recently heard Creative Labs’
new X-Fi (Extreme Fidelity) technology in action. And trust us, once you hear it too, you’ll never want to listen to standard PC
audio—be it music or gaming—ever again.
IT’S ALL IN
YOUR HEAD
Creative’s vision for this
leap forward in sound
quality is aimed directly
at your head…via your
headphones. Why
headphones? Because
Creative’s research
revealed that a sizable
majority of PC users
and gamers listen to
content almost exclusively
through headphones.
That would
seem counterintuitive,
considering the number
of 2.1, 3.1, 5.1, and
7.1 speaker systems
on the market, but
think about it: Teens
don’t want anyone to
hear what they’re
doing, LAN gamers
need headphones to
pick up their own aural
cues and to cancel out
the noise of their surroundings/competitors,
and unless you live
alone, the odds are
your housemates/
spouses/wardens don’t
want to be bothered by
you blasting Doom 3
demons in glorious 7.1
CMSS-3D – This
1. lets you enable/
disable the surround
sound, both over
headphones and
speakers. This is tied
to your speaker selection;
for example, if
you change from
headphones to 5.1, the
options here will
change as well.
Crystalizer – This
2. lets you
enable/disable the
crystalizer and also
has a slider used to
set the intensity of the
effect.
EQ – Use this to
3. enable/disable
and set standard EQ
settings. You can
adjust the EQ settings
and save them as a
personal profile or
choose from standard
EQ settings such as
acoustic, classical,
country, dance, rock,
vocal, etc.
Mixer – Volume
4. control for wave,
MIDI synth, CD player,
line-in, and mic, along
with enable/disable
controls for Smart
Volume Management,
EAX effects, and mic
environment FX.
surround sound cranked up to 11 at 2 a.m.
Creative isn’t the only manufacturer working on
headphone surround (see “The Competition”
sidebar), but as the company that arguably started
and has dominated the soundcard market for
some 16 years, it’s the one to beat. Powered by a
3.4GHz CPU capable of 10K MIPS that lets it perform
the demanding floating point calculations
you pay for in high-end receivers, the X-Fi card is
actually three cards in one: a gaming-audio solution,
a digital-entertainment product, and a prosumer-caliber
audio-creation tool. The X-Fi—
which is 24 times as powerful as Creative’s current
top-of-the-line Audigy card—is able to do all
these things so well because it dynamically
throws all its processing muscle behind whichever
application you want running at the time—simply
pop open the appropriate console and you’re
good to go.
82 > COMPUTER GAMING WORLD
MUSIC TO
Creative Labs’ X-Fi technology will change the way you
Speakers –
5. Allows you to
choose from among
headphones, 2.1, 4.1,
5.1, 6.1, or 7.1 speakers
and test all the
channels. It also
allows you to bring up
the THX console to
make sure your
speakers are calibrated
correctly.
THE OUTSIDE
WORLD
Perhaps the most striking
thing about X-Fi is
1
2
3
4
5
6
7 8 9
Bass – Allows
6. you to enable/
disable bass redirection
and features a
slider to set the
crossover frequency
(when bass redirection
is enabled).
The Mode button
7. on the bottom
left allows you to
switch between game
mode, audio-creation
mode, and entertainment
mode.
the Creative Multi-Speaker Surround (CMSS)
technology that jerks the sound out of your headphones’
ear cups and into the space around you.
The experience is like being perfectly positioned
in a room full of speakers. Instead of sound flitting
back and forth between the right and left
side of your headphones, an ambient field is created,
making you feel as if you’ve been dropped
into the game world and bringing an intimacy to
the game action you didn’t know you were missing.
The effect is even more dramatic with music,
as it pulls rigid stereo mixes out into the world
and erases those dead zones you experience
To the right of
8. the Mode button
is a Settings button
that gets into a few
more advanced features,
such as setting
the digital I/O,
enabling automatic
headphone detection
and an external
decoder, mapping
surround sound channels
to different
speakers, and upmixing
DTS-ES 5.1 to 6.1.
10
Next to Settings
9. is Default, which
(obviously) restores
the default settings.
The volume
10. control is selfexplanatory.
when one side of the
headphones is silent.
The positional audio
even reflects elevation.
Perhaps the most dramatic demo we’ve heard
had a helicopter taking off and passing “overhead.”
As the chopper lifted off, you could hear
the clear but subtle cues indicating how high
above you it was as it moved throughout the
CMSS airspace and eventually came to a landing.
Imagine having that kind of realistic audio in a
game like Battlefield 2—actually, you won’t need
to imagine it for long, because BF2 is one of the
first games to be optimized for X-Fi.
Unfortunately, you won’t be able to hear it until
the cards start shipping this fall (along with a special
bundled version of UT 2004, also optimized
for X-Fi).
But don’t let all this optimization talk discour-