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 Gameguru Mania News - Nov,02 2006 -  
OpenAL and Windows Vista - tech
(hx) 03:48 PM CET - Nov,02 2006 - Post a comment / read (5)
With the launch of Windows Vista just around the corner, both gamers and game developers are asking questions about audio compatibility with OpenAL. This article is intended to address the issues. Here's a taster:
With Microsoft's decision to remove the audio hardware layer in Windows Vista, legacy DirectSound 3D games will no longer use hardware 3D algorithms for audio spatialization. Instead they will have to rely upon the new Microsoft software mixer that is built into Windows Vista. This new software mixer will give the users basic audio support for their old Direct Sound games but since it has no hardware layer, all EAX effects will be lost, and no individual per-voice processing can be performed using dedicated hardware processing.

EAX has become the de facto standard for real-time effects processing. It has been incorporated in hundreds of games and has become the method of choice for game developers wanting to add interactive environment effects to their titles. Some of the best selling games of all time use the EAX extensions to DirectSound 5.0 and beyond, including Warcraft3, Diablo2, World of Warcraft, Half Life, Ghost Recon, F.E.A.R. and many others. Under Windows Vista, these games will be losing the hardware support that came as standard under the previous Windows Operating Systems, and will no longer provide real-time interactive effects, making them sound empty and lifeless by comparison to the way they sound on Windows XP.

The good news for owners of advanced audio cards like SoundBlaster X-Fi is that the developer community has been preparing for this for over 3 years. Hardware audio will not be disappearing with the launch of Windows Vista. Games that support OpenAL today will continue to provide full hardware-enhanced 3D audio under Windows Vista. This includes games such as Battlefield 2, Doom3, Unreal Tournament2k4, Dungeon and Dragons Online, Prey, Quake 4, and many others (a full list can be found at http://www.openal.org/titles.html). These games have complete hardware-based HRTF support for multiple speaker and headphone setups as well as full support for all the different versions of EAX. Also, these games will be able to take advantage of the hardware-accelerated path on supporting hardware for performance and quality increases.
last 10 comments:
devilhood(02:16 PM CET - Nov,03 2006 )
Creative have really started to pick up the pace with producing good cards, and it all started from the Audigy ZS range.
One thing that bugged me though, was the small jump they made from the Audigy ZS Platinum Pro to the X-Fi Elite Pro.
The X-Fi Elite Pro had minimal improvements which are mostly driver related, the external module was made slightly thinner and looks shiny.
Now all I can get for my ZS Platinum Pro on eBay is a mere 60 to 70 quid maximum and both cards only have a 5... maybe 10% difference in quality output. Funny that.
At least the driver updates are unified for both cards now.

xxxx(07:11 PM CET - Nov,03 2006 )
Yeah and the X-Fi was supposed to handle a lot more MIPS yet still games stutter and the chirping and stuff is all still there. But to say it was a small jump tells me you aren't quite understanding that the X-Fi is completely revamped. Totally new CPU and handles sound tasks in a totally new way. This is the majority reason Linux has no drivers for X-Fi.. but again, hilarious all the old problems are still there.

Creative accusing nVidia of stealing the bandwidth etc has never seemed to go much further. Or I haven't heard of a counter-argument from nVidia.

I still think Creative should sell off more of their tech so others more interested in providing support could take over. Their forums are a disaster of complaints.

Safer(08:18 PM CET - Nov,03 2006 )
I'm sorta with XXXX on this one - due to god damn aweful driver support of their cards and near to non in-house testing on diffrent platforms it's no wonder they try to pull of the scape-goat called "It's the nForce4's fault! Seriously!".

But I love their cards, the hardware can't be compared to anything else WHEN it works like it should. Thankfully I haven't got the problems some of the techsupport customers I have with their equipment.

devilhood(03:04 PM CET - Nov,04 2006 )
XXXX, I was aware of the CPU in the card, I just failed to mention it in my ranting :P and even though the new CPU sounded great on paper, it is nothing too spectacular to rave about.
The revamped card still has negligible differences in real-world game performance and the price tag didn't sway me either.
Sure, it has 127 voice capability, a slightly better noise ratio, but the cpu utilization is only marginally better when compared to the Audigy ZS Platinum Pro.
The fiasco with Creative's ability to write good drivers for their cards was on-going for so many years before the release of the X-Fi, I remember those god awful SB Live! days still, heheh those were interesting times. I'm so glad they have managed to pull their weight and actually get a good driver release out.
I'll probably wait until they release their new set of cards before updating mine, unless Vista starts being iffy with the Audigy's OpenAL support of course.

(02:16 AM CET - Nov,08 2006 )
Creative Labs' George Thorn (Director, Digital Media Relations) has sent in an official response to Microsoft's decision to gimp 3D audio in Vista:

quote:

I lead the game developer relations group at Creative and appreciate the opportunity to comment on some of the questions being asked about legacy DirectSound based 3D audio titles running on Windows Vista.
Legacy games that were written to use Microsoft's own 3D audio API will very likely suffer from degraded audio on Vista through no fault of Creative's. They will also degrade on motherboard audio solutions, on Mystique cards, and even on Aureal Vortex based cards. This is because Microsoft made the decision during Vista's development to remove the hardware abstraction layer that allows audio hardware access to the audio streams coming from an application. This is not something that Creative or any other audio vendor can simply rectify with a driver update. It is a consequence of the Vista architecture itself.

In a climate that has lacked a dependable audio API component, dating back to the outset of DirectX, Creative, Nvidia and others have worked diligently to establish OpenAL as an alternative API for games developers to use on the PC as well as on other platforms. With Vista, games written to OpenAL will be able to bypass the new Microsoft audio scheme and talk directly to OpenAL hardware, which allows products like our Sound Blaster X-Fi soundcard to deliver EAX processing and vivid 3D audio over headphones or on multichannel speaker systems.

Many sound designers are more than happy to talk about the value that EAX has brought to their games. We share some perspectives here. Under Vista, the only way developers can continue to add EAX effects to their titles is via the OpenAL API. This explains in part why there are an increasing number of top shelf titles that support OpenAL.

I encourage anyone to experience for themselves the audio quality and realism that X-Fi provides for gaming, and for the reasons outlined here, this is best experienced with game titles that support OpenAL. However, the issue of legacy DirectSound 3D titles running on Vista is a very real problem for all gamers, regardless of what audio system they have. So that we can continue to support gamers that use and enjoy our products and are planning to migrate to Vista, we are studying the feasibility of a translation scheme that would provide all of the benefits of Sound Blaster audio with legacy titles. I look forward to sharing more details on that with you in the near future. Our overall objective remains, as it always has, to provide an outstanding audio experience for you, the gamers.

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