Sound cards did have a role in processing sound placement and environmental effects, back when DirectSound3D and OpenAL were still in prevalent use. However, with the move to XAudio2 + X3DAudio, FMOD Ex, and other such APIs and middlewares, everything's processed on the CPU now...unfortunately not as good as it used to be with the old APIs, but that's the way it is.NamelessPlayer

I'm using HDMI out not optical. Does that change anything? Also I thought I was understanding that a sound card processes things such as sound placement in games so you would have a different digital signal with a card than without.

Thanks for the replies. I'm not sure what I'm looking for when I'm looking at cards though. Can anyone help me figure out what features I actually need? Does a sound card effect audio when it's output digitally? And what features such as EAX am I looking for for gaming? (I know EAX isn't popular anymore it's just an example). Someone else told me I don't need a sound card at all for digital out but I'm not sure if he knows what he's talking about or not.

So I'm attempting to build a PC and looking at sound cards and I can't find much good information about what I would need in a sound card for my current setup. I am connecting my PC to a surround receiver which at least for the time being has 5.0 speakers connected but I would hopefully future proom myself for 7.1 sound. I plan to connect to my reciever via the HDMI output on my graphics card, (I plan to buy GTX 670). For DVDs and Blu-rays my understanding is that I can bitstream to my reciever which means I wouldn't need a souncard to process anything here. What I would want is for various digital music files and games to sound good. In my searching I am finding recommendations for cards such as ASUS Xonar Essence STX, but the details seem to suggest they are geared toward headphone use and I'm having trouble finding out what is best for actual surround sound.

Well I went and answered my own question since no one else did. And the answer is by redownloading the game I get Arcade Edition as opposed to regular Super Street Figher IV without having to pay for the update. Sweet. I'm glad I went with Games on Demand for this one now.

How is the camera horrible? I remember a pretty standard right stick orbital camera.Black_Knight_00

One bizarre thing was that when the camera went to "stealth mode" meaning that the y axis shifted the view up or down instead of rotating the view, the y axis controls become inverted even though they are not inverted anywhere else in the game.

The fixed camera positions or the combat camera that switched views on the fly often had awkward transitions that caused me to be running in the wrong direction after a camera change, or didn't show what I needed to see, such as my boat being off camera. Sometimes I would get this obnoxious flicker where the camera was switching between views too fast to see anything. That happened a lot when the boat backed up into something. The absolute worst camera moment in the game was in the slaughterhouse and I was fighting these creatures that looked like Rays (the sea creatures), except they were on land. The camera was constantly switching in a very disorienting manner that made me switch what direction I was traveling in avery couple seconds or so and half the time what I was fighting was off camera, as was my partner (Double H) whom I kept hitting on accident because I couldn't see where he was. Fortunately in this case, button mashing can get you far in this game.

Opening up the camera/first person view, sometimes I was facing in the wrong direction even though I had carefully rotated my character to the direction I wanted to be facing. This seemed to happen in a spots where the third person view was a fixed camerera

The boat controls don't allow you to rotate your x axis view with the camera stick, which would be helpul when trying to scan your surroundings for where to go. Also the y axis only has two positions, the standard which is a little too low and an overhead view which you have to hold down camera stick for and doesn't show you very far in front of you. This was mainly a problem in the sections when you have to navigate around mines in the water.

So I just finished playing Beyond Good and Evil HD on Xbox 360 and found that it many ways it is still a great game, but man do the camera controlls suck. I played the game several years ago on Gamecube and don't remember this. Maybe more games had bad cameras then and I was more used to it back then.

So I bought SSFIV, Games on Demand version last year. A few weeks ago I saw that it was in the new releases for Games on Demand though, which suggests to me that an updated version was released. Anyone know what's the deal with that and if I should re-download the new version?

I thought VF4 was the favorite VF game. Or am I just out of the loop. Also I thought Tekken 5 was supposed to be one of the better Tekken games.

So when the original came out I saw a news story where Justin Wong called MVC3 the cheapest fighting game ever, or something along those lines. Does the new Ultimate edition make the game less cheap? (Note: the new version is not a rip off to me since I didn't buy the original.)

Also a quick unrelated question. In SSFIV what does it mean when your victory box gets a "C" in it? It's clear what "U" "S" and "P" stand for but I can't figure out the "C."