Good to hear. But the Envy24HT doesn't have any sort of 3d hardware acceleration or API's, right? Ugh. And I hear Doom III won't even support hardware audio.
Well, the reason Doom III doesn't support hardware audio (if that is, in fact, the case) is because audio doesn't take up much CPU anyway. In Tech-Reports review of the M-Audio Revolution, which uses the Via Envy24HT, they included several game benchmarks, and the Revolution ended up last in each one--but never by too much (with the exception of the synthetic bench, which I tend to not care about). Basically, you sacrifice a few FPS for much higher quality sound. And when I'm still getting over 60 FPS anway, I don't care.
In Quake III (on the high end machine at 1024x768), for instance, it was the difference between 225.1 FPS on the non-HT Envy24 and 213.2 FPS on the Revolution. The biggest difference was with Serious Sam using EAX. Obviously, since EAX is Creative's own API, they had the upper hand. Again at 1024x768, the Audigy 2 got 107.7 FPS, and the Revolution got 93.8 FPS. Now, if you can tell the difference between 107.7 and 93.8, you're full of...um...it.
Basically, I think if you have the hardware to play a given game at a reasonable framerate, then you shouldn't notice the difference with hardware accelerated audio. Even if the difference was noticable, I'll trade a few FPS for higher quality audio anyday. It's like turning on FSAA/AF--you're gonna lose FPS, but it's worth the sacrifice to make everything look nicer.
Squibby