I just ditched my SB Live card for a very old Turtle Beach card. I can finally play Grand Prix Legends again! With the Live card instead of an engine noise this game would emit a high picthed scream, which pretty much made the game unplayable. I also notice with my replacment card that MOHAA and other games seem a little less jerky when multiple sounds play. I am pretty sure this was a driver problem, but I am not positive.
I tried every slot on my motherboard, every driver I could find, and nothing would fix it. For the TB, I just popped it into the first open slot and used whatever driver auto installed with XP. What is the story with Creative and their crappy drivers? While I was in driver hell, I noticed that the lateset creative drivers for XP did nothing for the games I played but did manage to break the control panel for the SB Live card. Meanwhile, most every new machine comes with some version of the Live card. What is up with that?
Creative is notorious for incompatibility issues with their hardware and software. Most people don’t notice because they skillfully engineer their products around common gaming setups, so in most cases there are no problems even though they routinely ignore hardware and driver standards. But if you have one of those configurations that expect a standards-conforming card/driver and find a Soundblaster instead… well, you’re screwed. Creative doesn’t care about standards, or about the minority of customers that care about standards.
I’ve got a tale of my own. When I got my DSL connection I first tried to install an AVM Fritz DSL/ISDN PCI card which is pretty much the standard DSL card in Germany. Once I put the card in, my computer would lock up at random intervals. The AVM website said this was a known problem due to – you guessed it – Soundblaster cards. Creative ignores proper busmaster DMA protocol for their cards, and since the Fritz card also uses busmaster DMA they can’t co-exist. Even though the PCI standard says they should be able to coexist. I had to buy an Allied Telesyn AT-AR215 USB ADSL modem instead. The only other option would have been to use another soundcard.
Has anyone tried the KX-Project drivers? ( http://kxproject.spb.ru/index.php ) They work with audigys and Live!'s, but seem to be more musician focused as it’s rather thin on the gamer features (Very limited Direct3D, no EAX).
Still, BF1942 barely supports the creative drivers, these couldn’t be much worse.
Truth be told, mine did too. But that was before I put together my current Anthlon. The last mobo I had with the VIA chipset hated my SB Live. Even with a different motherboard it is not behaving for me. Previously it was pointing the finger at VIA, but now I am getting angry with Creative. I’m not alone with having problems with this card. Some of it could be just because it’s so ubiquitous, but I don’t think that’s the whole story.
" But if you have one of those configurations that expect a standards-conforming card/driver and find a Soundblaster instead… well, you’re screwed"
Errr whatever…My Live! has ran fine for 3+ years with two diffrent MB’s, CPU’s, and 3 OS’s just fine. Every piece of hardware has problems. Anybody ever take into account the fact their are probably more SB cards/chips out there than every other card combined? Hence there’s going to be more problems listed.
Yep. While I have no doubt whatsoever that the Live! causes problems in some configurations, the SB Live I have in my main rig and the Live! 5.1 in my TV recorder rig have both offered me zero problems.
Not minimizing the problems others have had; just chiming in to avoid the appearance that the cards are universally bad for everyone.
Eh, I wasn’t trying to give that expression. Like I said, Creative targets common gaming systems so you won’t have problems on those. I’ve been using Soundblaster cards for years myself, and I can only recall two or three problems – the recent one with the Fritz card and some others that were so long ago that I don’t even remember what they were about.
But I’ve been seeing a lot of complaints here and there – no doubt because the cards are so popular – and it all boils down to this: Creative doesn’t care about PC engineering standards. As long as you have a fairly standard gaming PC you’re fine. But plug in some cards that aren’t so widespread, and the Soundblasters are likely to give problems – even if the unusual cards themselves are well-designed.
Is there any updated driver set for SB Live? If so, could you provide a link? I looked on Creative’s site and found only two non-driver related packages. One of the drivers that shipped with my Live 5.1 card–EMU10K1.VXD–isn’t digitally signed (i.e. it hasn’t been tested by MS). I suspect this is the source of sound problems with several recent games–notably, Mafia.
Yeah, the Creative site isn’t the easiest to find drivers. Worse, there’s a different download for each of SKU, and there appear to be at least a dozen SKUs.
Alternatively you can get the WHQL certified drivers from windows update–at least v4 WU had them.
It’s just that for the past year or so this Creative card has been cropping up at the bottom of all of my incompatibility problems–and I’ve gone through two mobo’s already. When I first bought the card, I took it back and swapped it for another, so I don’t think it’s just a bum card. Before this experiance, I never even thought about my sound card. Ah for the good old days!
No you don’t. I have several rigs here running SB Live!, SB Live! 5.1, SB Audigy Gamer, Turtle Beach Santa Cruz etc etc and I ALWAYS run into problems with CL cards. This has been the case for several years now.
The part I like the best? How those gits managed to disable HW acceleration in the latest Audigy drivers. I don’t care, since I didn’t install them. :D
Ciparis, get a Turtle Beach Santa Cruz or Philips card and save yourself the aggravation. Trust me on this.
I had an SB Live for the last 3 years. I had to ditch it because it wouldn’t work properly with IL2 Sturmovik. I updated to a SB Audigy and everything has been working fine now.
Still I am not happy with Creative’s driver updates - they are an absolute mess. The Sound Blaster series desperately needs a unified driver series like nVidia’s.
