Windows 8 Hardware Acceleration

[Nielo TM]

Can someone confirm whether Windows 8 supports the old audio hardware acceleration ?

 

[umeng2002]

EAX? I don't think so. OpenAL offers hardware acceleration though.

 

[IdiotInCharge]

OS-level support for hardware sound acceleration was yanked for Vista, and hasn't made a return in 7 or 8.

OpenAL will allow hardware acceleration, and Creative has code in their drivers to allow for EAX calls to be forwarded to OpenAL and work with their cards. Should work with older games, though I haven't tested this personally.

 

[Nielo TM]

My thoughts exactly but I came across this few hours ago, which sort of made me wonder if they've gone back to hardware offloading.

http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?t=351061

 

[XenIneX]

God, I hope not. The last thing the gaming industry needs is a return to the bad old days of having to support multiple hardware-specific proprietary audio APIs. And it's superfluous anyway; every game dev licenses one of the existing pre-rolled audio engines, all of which are fully capable of doing everything EAX did. And -- thanks to the proliferation of multi-core processors -- they do it for free, in spare CPU cycles.

I'll keep my software-mixed LPCM over HDMI, thanks.

 

[djoye]

I still think that 3D audio using software is sloppy these days or at least it's very poorly done. I don't understand why software 3D is in such a sad state but I'm guessing Creative did their homework and EAX is actually very good (although I hear A3D was better) and maybe they've patented the stuff and software-based solutions are having difficulty coming up with a better way to produce such environmental effects without infringing. I pay a lot of attention to audio in games and there's just something not right about software-based effects.

Deus Ex HR seemed to have some sloppy audio effects, particularly when you're in the sewer talking to Zelazny, but maybe that was programmer error; many other games just have underwhelming environmental effects. I play a bit of Killing Floor and, with the proper OpenAL+EAX going, the environmental effects are just right and the Doppler shift from enemy sounds and people firing in the distance is very convincing compared to how most games now days just seem to drop the volume on gunfire and players in the distance instead of actually applying a filter to sounds based on objects between you and the source of the sound.

 

[XenIneX]

I still think that 3D audio using software is sloppy these days or at least it's very poorly done. I don't understand why software 3D is in such a sad state but I'm guessing Creative did their homework and EAX is actually very good (although I hear A3D was better) and maybe they've patented the stuff and software-based solutions are having difficulty coming up with a better way to produce such environmental effects without infringing. I pay a lot of attention to audio in games and there's just something not right about software-based effects.

Deus Ex HR seemed to have some sloppy audio effects, particularly when you're in the sewer talking to Zelazny, but maybe that was programmer error; many other games just have underwhelming environmental effects. I play a bit of Killing Floor and, with the proper OpenAL+EAX going, the environmental effects are just right and the Doppler shift from enemy sounds and people firing in the distance is very convincing compared to how most games now days just seem to drop the volume on gunfire and players in the distance instead of actually applying a filter to sounds based on objects between you and the source of the sound.

I blame console ports. Devs are eschewing good audio design in favor of "good enough" cross-platform APIs. Hopefully, once the next generation of consoles comes out, they'll start supporting decent environmental audio again.

 

[SirMaster]

Is there a point in hardware accelerating sound processing? It's hardly even takes 1% CPU usage on a modern processor.

Sound processing hasn't gotten more intensive year after year like graphics.

 

[djoye]

I blame console ports. Devs are eschewing good audio design in favor of "good enough" cross-platform APIs. Hopefully, once the next generation of consoles comes out, they'll start supporting decent environmental audio again.

Good point but those cross-platform audio APIs should really have some decent environmental audio effects available to them. Maybe they're already milking what they can from the console and can't afford to waste CPU cycles on nice environmental effects.

Is there a point in hardware accelerating sound processing? It's hardly even takes 1% CPU usage on a modern processor.

Sound processing hasn't gotten more intensive year after year like graphics.

Exactly; hardware acceleration shouldn't be necessary but for some reason software processing seems really weak. Maybe consoles, with their lack of resources, are holding back the use of good environmental audio in modern games. Since consoles don't have dedicated hardware, they would depend on the CPU for audio processing and god knows they're pushing those things as hard as they can now days.

 

[gamerk2]

First and formost: Vista removed H/W acceleration of the Directsound API. Thats all. OpenAL and other audio implementations could still be H/W accelerated, assuming proper driver support. (Creative handles EAX effects post-Vista via an OpenAL wrapper).

Win8 brings back native H/W acceleration again, but given how audio doesn't need a ton of processing, it really isn't needed.

 

[Impulse]

How exactly does Win8 bring it back tho? Are they re-implementing DirectSound? Is there a native OpenAL implementation instead?