HEXUS:bean - No DirectSound 3D surround output in Vista?

[MD]

If you are planning to upgrade to Vista as soon as it's out you should be aware that the Hardware abstraction layer is not supported any more, not only that, but Microsoft has no idea when, or if at all, it will be fixed.

Find out more here.

[Silent Shark]

As users of Vista and Creative sound cards will know, this has been quite a troublesome thing for hardware makers to deal with.

Creative have come up with a way of intercepting DirectSound and sending it to the sound card via OpenAL (which is still supported by Vista). This isn't perfect but it has allowed us to get our surround sound in games.

Any change from Microsoft, while welcome, is bound to disrupt CL drivers and cause even more frustration to current users.

EDIT: Seems that they may be referring to what Creative have actually done :S . I thought Microsoft were going to come in and fix it. Wishful thinking I suppose.

[redlight]

I think its only the X-Fi cards that will be supported.
Lucky for me Auzentech are going to do the same for the X-Mystique,X-Plosion and X-Meridian cards. Two of my rigs have X-Mystique cards in them and I was getting a little worried. The drivers should be ready first week in February.

[alsenior]

reason number 7 why i won't be upgrading to vista soon. if ever

[ExceededGoku]

^ what? Microsoft is simply clearing out a function which in the past the sound card should have been doing (hence the naem sound card). If anything this is the sound cards maker fault since they have been relying for a while now that most of the work be done by the OS. It's about time they took that away and let the audio card makers do it properly. It's almost like the graphics card makers assuming that Microsoft will code their drivers for them...

[willardjuice]

Originally Posted by redlight

I think its only the X-Fi cards that will be supported.
Lucky for me Auzentech are going to do the same for the X-Mystique,X-Plosion and X-Meridian cards. Two of my rigs have X-Mystique cards in them and I was getting a little worried. The drivers should be ready first week in February.

No Auzentech is not doing the same work around like Creative has done with Alchemy. They are just introducing drivers for Vista in February. DirectSound3D has never been hardware accelerated on C-Media based cards, so there is no visable difference between XP and Vista for Auzentech users (aside from the lack of Vista drivers currently).

[Silent Shark]

Originally Posted by alsenior

reason number 7 why i won't be upgrading to vista soon. if ever

I've learnt in computing never to say things like that.

Are you still using Win 95? I doubt it.

[MD]

Originally Posted by willardjuice

No Auzentech is not doing the same work around like Creative has done with Alchemy. They are just introducing drivers for Vista in February. DirectSound3D has never been hardware accelerated on C-Media based cards, so there is no visable difference between XP and Vista for Auzentech users (aside from the lack of Vista drivers currently).

He is correct, whilst Creative told me it was propriatary to their products on a call with the brand manager I can see from the beta program that it has in fact, somehow, been reported to work with other devices too from the beta test community.

[alsenior]

Originally Posted by Silent Shark

I've learnt in computing never to say things like that.

Are you still using Win 95? I doubt it.

but windows 95 didn't cause so many incompatibly problems did it. especially with something as such as the sound i/o of a MULTIMEDIA system did it?

[redlight]

Originally Posted by willardjuice

No Auzentech is not doing the same work around like Creative has done with Alchemy. They are just introducing drivers for Vista in February. DirectSound3D has never been hardware accelerated on C-Media based cards, so there is no visable difference between XP and Vista for Auzentech users (aside from the lack of Vista drivers currently).

Oops sorry I was thinking DDL as long as I keep my cards and I dont have to buy anything made by CL I dont care.

[ivano]

Originally Posted by ExceededGoku

^ what? Microsoft is simply clearing out a function which in the past the sound card should have been doing (hence the naem sound card). If anything this is the sound cards maker fault since they have been relying for a while now that most of the work be done by the OS. It's about time they took that away and let the audio card makers do it properly. It's almost like the graphics card makers assuming that Microsoft will code their drivers for them...

I'd have to disagree and think that the evidence is quite to the contrary, if you look at Creative, much maligned as they are (the microsoft effect, the dominant force in the industry gets the most grief), they have contributed immensely to the development of in-game audio. Admittedly, I'm a long time Creative user, from the SB Pro days so I've followed them all the way, and regardless of the small amount of driver niggles you get with ANYTHING related to a PC, they've pretty much got their sh1t together and you can now run an x-fi on just the drivers and the Win 3.1 style console and opt out of all the rest of the "bloatware", some of which is pretty good if you've ever tried finding Window's wave editor, audio converter tool, smart recorder...anything beyond the windows sndrec32 which is XPs deluxe recording tool!

Firstly, they are the only manufacturer who develop audio chips dedicated to hardware accelerated surround sound (EAX, excellent 3D positional audio, multi voice, virtual surround over any headphones). Every other card on the market, including the new Barracuda (that requires proprietary headphones!) is just an OEM Envy chip from Via with no significant gaming features on the chip. And when you've spent up to $500 on a graphics card, spending $99, or less online if you shop around, for a card that gives you all that is paltry, pretty much the same as a stick of ram.

Secondly, they have continuously developed the gaming world's 2 key audio api's which were never adopted by the O/S so don't see where you're going with the argument, the O/S DX audio just provides software mixing and 3DPA with no eax. And even the DX 3dpa sounds way better with a hardware solution doing all the math.
EAX: From 1.0 up to 5.0, granted you can only get up to 2.0 on non Creative platforms, but eax vs none is day and night, try playing COD without it.
OpenAL: an open source project for ASIO style low latency gaming audio cross platform, so they can't really be accused of a monopoly type lockdown. Doom, Quake, BF and UT all went OpenAL so goes to show that the publishers are happy to adopt the most efficient api's that give the best in-game experience (openal.org)

Thirdly - MS dropped the ball on providing an OSX type Core Audio model for gaming where audio was important, they are still struggling to get DX10 out of the bag
Check it out bluescreening the week Vista hits retail! (see the inquirer)
If the OS had done such a great job, why did Creative have to release their alchemy patch so that all your XP DX3D audio games didn't turn to stereo after you spent a fortune upgrading your machine to run VistOSX?

At the end of the day, if people are happy to put up with low quality motherboard audio (sucks for heapdphones) with crackling and hard disk whirring and the in-game equivalent of Black and White audio, it's a free world, personally, I don't care who comes up with the solutions, but I'm willing to fork out a few shekels on a decent soundsystem for my PC

[vrykyl]

holy mega first post batman!!! welcome to the forums

[willardjuice]

Originally Posted by Matt D

He is correct, whilst Creative told me it was propriatary to their products on a call with the brand manager I can see from the beta program that it has in fact, somehow, been reported to work with other devices too from the beta test community.

Uh what?

This doesn't even work on Audigy 2/4, let alone other cards. You either miss read or were given bad information.

[polandro]

Originally Posted by redlight

I think its only the X-Fi cards that will be supported.
Lucky for me Auzentech are going to do the same for the X-Mystique,X-Plosion and X-Meridian cards. Two of my rigs have X-Mystique cards in them and I was getting a little worried. The drivers should be ready first week in February.

You may be disappointed, check the compatibility page now:

Originally Posted by Auzentech

02/02/07
We are pleased to announce the Beta release of our X-Meridian driver for 32-bit editions of Microsoft Windows Vista™. Drivers for 64-bit versions are still under development. We are also continuing work on the X-Plosion and X-Meridian Vista drivers.

No X-Mystique development for Vista? I have an X-Mystique too and am running it on Vista using the drivers from http://cmediadrivers.googlepages.com/home which work but don't support ddl just bit-perfect output with AC3 passthrough on the TOSLINK output.

I just opened a support ticket with Auzentech and I suggest you do too.

[Lenny_Nero]

Originally Posted by Silent Shark

I've learnt in computing never to say things like that.

Are you still using Win 95? I doubt it.

I (as well as many people I know and loads of companies) am still using Win2000, I have still to see any windows OS that looks better for my needs i.e. a secure, fast and stable OS with wide compatibility.

Strange you mention Win 95 as I hear from many sources that Vista's beta TCP/IP stack is having all of the same problems that its did, but at least with the 9x/NT based OS's the stack was basically ripped *BSD code so it was known to work. Where as the Vista one is written from scratch *** code... make of that what you will.

Again I can see nothing that I would need or even want from Vista, and everything I have seen that is trying to sell or show it off seem to go on about 'bling' that it has and TBH big deal. The reason why I dont even run XP is because all of that type of stuff that was just bolted on top and it just slows it down.