hi everyone,
i have for the past year been using the audiophile 24/96 with ASIO. its been a general conception that ASIO is better when working with midi.
but recently i went to my friends house who has a SB Live card, and it seemed his settings using Direct Sound got better performance.
question is: which of the two is better, and why??
best regards,
xerxes
ASIO with SB Live only works if you’re using the KX driver instead of creative’s driver.
If you get that, the performance is MUCH better with ASIO 
ASIO is only really important if you’re using an external MIDI keyboard to control the output of renoise for samples or VST instruments, where low latency is absolutely vital for the instrument to be responsive enough to play the thing without putting yourself off.
If you’re just editing notes by hand, high latency shouldn’t really make a difference, other than being a slight annoyance.
it depends on what you mean by “performances”.
According to what I see by using ReNoise on my P3 733 with Terratec EWX24/96 (Terratec drivers are known to suck), DirectSound causes much more latency (about 300ms to avoid most of crackles instead of 60ms with ASIO) but is a little more stable in audio streaming.
I believe that with faster PCs, all of clues are for ASIO’s victory on every aspect.
In the end, as Giles says, if you’re not aiming to make any live MIDI activity, you can easily survive with DirectSound, unless 100+ ms of latency does make you sick
actually, we got 5ms latency using direct sound. now, i am not sure if it was creative, it might have been some other card. but it did not support ASIO. anyhow, it worked great! my bb3 entry crackled at some parts on my computer. but worked fine with his. our computers are basically the same, except i use a 24/96 with asio.
perhaps my settings are messed up? 
ASIO on the creative won’t work, unless you use this (which is worth it anyway, cause it’s a MUCH better driver):
friend of mine has an m-audio delta and has crackling issues with ASIO, but i think its related to the driver’s handling of clipping as opposed to buffer underruns. a possible solution to ASIO crackling is turn the master volume down and see if it goes away.
careful with the kxdrivers, btw. make a copy of your hardware profile before trying to install them in case they make your system unbootable.
i’m using 1.7ghz athlon + 512 ddr and sblive 5.1.
yes, i get 5ms on renoise with directsound and creative’s native drivers. but there’s much more cpu load in dsound than asio with kx drivers.
i find the creative’s wdm drivers more stable in directsound AND provide better latency (in dsound) than kx drivers. kx asio tends to get a bit crackly sometimes, and i need to reload the asio control panel to ‘reset’ it.
anyhow’s if i use more vsti, i’ll get myself a cheap audigy SE… i’m sure it’s much much cheaper than a audigy 2 EX. though it lacks true 24/96.