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Something that has annoyed the hell out of me for a long time is the fact that some games decide to use OpenAL as their sound solution and, despite that fact that it is in theory "open" in reality it sucks on everything not Creative Labs. CL cards get full surround sound, lots of neat effects, etc. Everything else get a crap stereo implementation.
Well, not anymore. Some guys made an OSS updates software OpenAl implementation called OpenAL Soft. You can grab it here. It supports up to 7.1 surround sound, HRTF, and a few other things like that. Works like a charm too, I now have surround sound in DDO using my GTX 980's HDMI out.
You do have to set it up on a per-game basis though. Depending on the game you can either extract the soft_oal.dll to the directory and set the game to use it in the options/ini, or you take that DLL and replace the wrap_oal.dll or OpenAL32.dll with it.
Whatever the case, it is nice if you play older games that are OpenAL reliant as you aren't stuck with stereo anymore.
Do note this is for OpenAL stuff only, things that need DirectSound hardware to do surround sound still won't work.
Well, not anymore. Some guys made an OSS updates software OpenAl implementation called OpenAL Soft. You can grab it here. It supports up to 7.1 surround sound, HRTF, and a few other things like that. Works like a charm too, I now have surround sound in DDO using my GTX 980's HDMI out.
You do have to set it up on a per-game basis though. Depending on the game you can either extract the soft_oal.dll to the directory and set the game to use it in the options/ini, or you take that DLL and replace the wrap_oal.dll or OpenAL32.dll with it.
Whatever the case, it is nice if you play older games that are OpenAL reliant as you aren't stuck with stereo anymore.
Do note this is for OpenAL stuff only, things that need DirectSound hardware to do surround sound still won't work.
