14 DAY TRIAL // Creative Technology seems to be losing some grounds especially in the gamer segment since, according to a study performed by Valve Software, only about 15% of gamers use sound cards made by Creative Labs. All the rest use integrated audio.
According to Valve, the most popular audio device remains the onboard Realtek AC97 audio, which comes integrated in lots of motheboards and has many forms (ranging from 650 codec to 88x HD codecs). About 26.28% of the total number of users (or 222 thousand) use Realtek's onboard sound. The second is SoundMax digital audio utilized by 9.5% of the gamers while in the third place we find C-Media with 7.69%.
Even though Creative Labs' audio cards are still used by 14.53% of the total users who have completed the survey, the most popular Creative sound card still remains the older Audigy 2 ZS (emu 10k2 based) with a share of 3.26% . As a matter of fact, the older Audigy "sounds" better than the latest X-Fi which is currently being used by only 21.5 thousand users (or 2.54%).
I think that the poor integration of Creative's devices into gamer PCs has a lot to do with two things. First, EAX has been dropped by Vista and future Creative drivers won't integrate it. OpenAl will be the next-gen audio API, but that won't offer Creative any advantages over Via and C-Media cards. But there's another thing that worries Creative. Recently, onboard sound jumped up a lot if you think about the quality it offers. If you compare a plain Audigy 2 with a Realtek 850/650 chip, Audigy is far superior; but the new HD codecs (88x) come with vast improvements over the older generation and they offer a good option to older emu-based Creatives. They're no match for X-Fi but they sound good enough for gamers.