Creative releases Linux GPL X-Fi drivers (Fudzilla)

I haven't looked much at sound cards in the last decade, but something I REALLY want is hardware, realtime, transparent, near-zero latency AC3 or DTS encoding for 5.1 or 7.1 audio through SPDIF. Hardware mixing would be nice but is not mandatory. I have tried the ALSA a52-plugin and it works, but the latency is horrible, making it unusable for gaming. Currently I have 6x analog cables from the computer to the living room but it's less than ideal.
Is there a sound card that works with Linux that can do this?