Well, yes, this is a flashlight in my pocket.

Yeah, I haven’t finished it either.  HL2 Episode One is a little more real-world, in that with lower resolutions the engine will choose the highest AA & AF settings it can for your system.  Unlike a recent high-profile Conroe review (Hilbert *caughs*), the settings at 1024x768 with everything high, and HDR enabled, were not bottlenecking the video card.  The X-Fi was in ‘game’ mode, including EAX enabled and CMSS-3D disabled.

Well, now that's encouraging!  It is also worth noting that HL2: Episode One does not use EAX, but the Miles Sound System.  HL2 is also a native 5.1 surround-sound game, which levels the playing field quite a bit, and we can see what the HDA X-Plosion 7.1 can do.

Same trend as with FEAR, Analog, DD Live, then DTS.  But this time with the X-Plosion 7.1 scoring a very solid second place overall.  All this without EAX, I might add, and I didn't really miss it.  Okay, one more shot of Alyx...

Need for Speed: Most Wanted

Um, yeah, uh, it's my wife's car...

I might be the only reviewer using this game for the purposes of benchmarking.  NFS:MW is a stereo-only game for the PC, so it is perfect to test out the DD Live and DTS.  It also does not support EAX, so all cards are on a level playing field.

Wait... would I call this a hot pursuit?

Ah, the reviewers nightmare: benchmarks too close to call.  There may be a cap at 60 FPS on NFS:MW, but I can't find any hard evidence of that.  FRAPS had the FPS between 55 and 75, with these being the averages, so that would indicate a lack of a cap.  In any case, on to the encoding methods.

Well, we've seen this trend before from the preceding pages, the X-Plosion 7.1 takes a very slight performance hit from either encoding method.  With EAX enabled games, we do see the X-Fi in the lead as we would think it should by virtue of both being Creative properties.  The X-Plosion 7.1 doesn't suffer too much from the lack of EAX and performs well enough with those games to not be much of a concern.  The lack of EAX might also hurt immersion in games, but I have found that almost all recent games have sound engines good enough to not really benefit by having EAX in the first place.  Sound engines will also become more capable with increasing CPU power, and so I would imagine Creative actually have quite a problem.  At least until they figure out how to force console makers to adopt EAX as standard.  Oop, forget I said that.