Audio in Vista and why it's not Creative's fault.

[jester1176]

Alright, I've read threads all over the place, blaming Creative for game audio being broken in Vista. Well I just came across an article explaining the whole debacle.

http://openal.org/openal_vista.html

Key lines from the article, for people from the "TLDR" crowd:

Microsoft® will be removing DirectSound 3D Hardware support from Direct X with the launch of Windows Vista. DirectSound and DirectSound3D will still function; however, they will no longer use hardware acceleration.

This is huge. Many games in vista will seem to be downright BROKEN from an audio perspective. Without a directsound path, anything NOT using OpenAL will not be using hardware effects.

In some cases, where a game specifically looks for a hardware audio path, it may even fall back to plain stereo output.

This explains MANY of the problems i've read. People complaining that their speaker config works and they can make the speakers fire, but in-game all they get is stereo.

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).

What it comes down to is this...if hardware audio and effects are important to you, check to make sure the game supports OpenAL. This should also apply to the Audigy line of cards as those support OpenAL natively as well.

 

[pxc]

The real "problem" is that Creative is probably in no big rush to implement WASAPI extensions to enable hardware acceleration under Vista.

Vista's UAA has no built-in support for hardware acceleration (or proprietary extensions, for example), but that's one of the reasons WASAPI extensions are available. Hardware sound acceleration isn't impossible in Vista and it's likely other companies besides Creative will implement it first.

IMO, Creative might not be excited about supporting DS acceleration for 3 reasons: 1) If they implement it for one series like the X-Fi, older series owners will complain, 2) Creative has little competition in hardware accelerated OpenAL cards, so it's in their interest to push OpenAL and 3) the amount of work required is much more than what it took to port OpenAL to Vista.