Ah, 50's kitsch underwater, set to a spooky ambiance, and a soundtrack to die for, this is Bioshock.  Don't tell me how it ends, though--I just keep playing the same passageway over and over and over again.  All cards had issues with EAX, so for the benchmarks it was disabled.

Bioshock is a lovely game, powered by the Unreal 3 engine, with lovely sounds.  However, sound crackling with EAX appears to be a Bioshock-only phenomenon, since BF2142 had no crackles at all.  BF2142 doesn't have Mr. Bubbles, though... The cure was to disable EAX for the benchmarks.  The second thing we notice is that all the cards performed just about the same, but that's nothing surprising.  Now the X-Audio comes with CMSS3D, which can simulate surround sound with headphones, but we didn't test that either.

Subjectively, the X-Audio didn't stand out particularly, but perhaps that's a good thing.  The X-Meridian brought to my attention that there's a constant bass note (at least in the area I was testing) playing, and though it's not thunderous, it was more prominent in the X-Meridian than the X-Audio.  The onboard SimTel didn't bring it out at all.  Which one did I prefer?  I liked the X-Meridian a little better, but the X-Audio had better balance with reverb and other ambient sounds.