Creative releases Linux GPL X-Fi drivers (Fudzilla)

Well I don't know about this volume mixing stuff. I don't think there is any card in my experience that didn't have volume controls on it. Even any onboard card or whatever. So I guess I am confused about what your talking about. Maybe if I had more specifics I would be able to understand you better.

Although I am very far from being a audio expert. Just a hobbyist.

Modern systems with integrated audio come using the "HD audio" stuff, which has supplanted the old AC'97 standard as the 'vesa' of sound cards. With that you get surround sound output, spdif, and all that happy stuff. That stuff is as good as anything that came out in the market just a few years ago. I know a lot of people don't like it, but it's just fine for the majority of people and outperforms the rest of the components of hardware.

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I don't know about UT99, but UT2004 uses SDL libs so that's not a big deal.

With ID engine'd games like RTCW and those ilk you can get working with SDL in short order with et-sdl-sound hack. It works much better then other more generic pre-load hacks.

http://nullkey.ath.cx/et-sdl-sound/

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The way I see it this sort of stuff works just fine for other OSes. (Well windows, anyways). So it's not really a hardware issue, but a Linux issue.

Sure with XP your audio will go through kernel-level software mixing (kmixer) for video games and all that if your card doesn't support hardware mixing for DirectSound, but it's not going to stop your game from working or you getting sound. It just tacks on a extra 30msec of latency to absorb some of the jitters.

Of course with Vista everything goes through software mixing, even DirectSound, so this has left Creative up shit's creek without a paddle. There is functionally very little difference a high-end gaming card will have vs onboard audio on a modern machine for Vista users. (Unless the game decides to use OpenAL for audio, which none of them are going to do)

So it would be smart for Linux folks to be VERY friendly to Creative. We may have the only OS left, aside from XP (which Microsoft is trying to bury as fast as possible) that allows them to take advantage of their card's hardware features.