Hellboy :
Creative Soundcards are the standard which everyone recognises...
I dont think this company will be around for much longer...
The problem is that the software produced for these cards has been as buggy as hell... really is a poor show from creative and really have not pushed the format further...
9.1 comes out soon so that will need some processing power.... Realtek on board uses processing power compared to a proper sound card but the speed difference is negligable
actually, Vista/Win7 does ALL sound via software now. The new sound system for Vista/Win7 uses all 32bit Floating point calculations for excellent quality. All applications submit their sound streams to the sound API where Vista uses more 32bit calculations to mix the sound together. This also lets each application have it own volume set and the 32bit processing does VERY accurate volume scaling and mixing. The end resulting sound is then converted to whatever the soundcard outputs.
For backwards compatibility, the old sound API will accept whatever format the application throws at it then up-converts that bit stream into 32bit format before getting output to the lower level APIs. New applications can output directly to the New sound API but it all has to be in 32bit format.
Sound cards are treated as dumb output devices and Windows just sends a bit-stream to your soundcard and your soundcard output the bit-stream via DAC/Optical/COAX/etc
This means a soundcard is nothing more than a DAC with a small buffer and a bunch of physical outputs. About as useful as a hardware accelerated LCD monitor.
Yes, Vista/Win7 does support HW accel of sound via OpenAL, but the developers of Bad Company 2 said the quality of HW accelerated sound is MUCH worse than doing all your calculations on the CPU as 32bit. Also, HW based mixing is MUCH more limited on effects than CPU based, since you can do whatever you like using the CPU, you just have to use your own math instead of the premade EAX style stuff. Any decent game will have it's own sound engine and do all special effects on the CPU
edit: A good soundcard will still have a good DAC, so don't think a high end "gaming" soundcard will be a waste. But ignore the "gaming" aspect and concentrate on the DAC and physicals supported.