Creative Labs: The Microsoft of Sound - Competition Breeds Innovation
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This isn't the first time Creative Labs has acted as a less than reputable member of the hardware community. Does anyone remember Aureal? Before their business collapsed and were bought out by... yep, Creative Labs, they actually provided competition in the sound card business. Competition of course breeds innovation, as evidenced by the Vortex chipset and Aureal3D API found in games such as Thief back in the day. They also provided PCI based sound cards, while CL was stuck on the ISA bus. In order to correct that oversight, Creative "purchased" another company called Ensoniq in order to gain access to PCI technology. After that, Creative took Aureal to court over supposed patent infringement, which Aureal ended up winning. However, the lengthy legal proceedings cleaned them out of cash, and hastened their demise at the hands of Creative. Since that time, there really haven't been any true competitors to CL. At least not when it comes to game audio, regardless of what has recently found its way into motherboards.
At this point, I've only cited what amounts to a grand history lesson. That still leaves out the current situation. Such as the drivers: relating to how I don't believe I've seen anyone comment positively on their quality. Or the size of them. Creative does deserve some credit for their support of the DVD-A standard in PC's, which no one else currently offers that I know of. However, due to a lack of competition, as ATI is to nVidia, or AMD to Intel, they seem to be content to sit on their thumbs and make use of dubious patents to force their software into places where it was not desired. I might not be alone in hoping that the upcoming HD Audio replacement for AC '97 in integrated audio breaks into their profit margins a bit. Or one company's idea to offload sound processing to the GPU in video cards instead comes alive and shows promise. Anything to break up what amounts to a one man show in the area of PC audio currently.
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