I've used dedicated sound cards for a long time with one specific memory being Aureal Vortex 2 card that was pretty much literally a cheat in Counter-strike. Very popular cards in Finland back in the day.
These days I couldn't live without my X-FI. I need that optical in port to get sound out of consoles and optical in is a very rare feature on onboard cards. Some motherboards have those, but it's cheaper to buy a separate X-FI card at that point. All my consoles are plugged into the same monitor(s) my computer is plugged into so HDMI sound is completely out of the question due to sound quality, and if I plug my consoles directly into my speakers, I can't have PC sound on at the same time as console sound so that's not an option either. Plenty of console games I want to listen to podcast, watch a movie, follow a stream while playing so I need sound out of both consoles and PC at the same time.
SVM is also pretty useful for watching specific movies. Onboard sound cards have similar features (sound volume normalization) but all the ones I've tried just suck compared to what the Creative solution offers.
I dread the day my soundcard breaks. I'll just have to try and find another one with similar feature set which is getting harder and harder.