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Originally Posted by Zantham
Quote Subman:
ANyway, my one biggest beef with DX10 is that 'all' audio is rendered via software. I mean, what is MS thinking? Where is my accelerated audio? THat is going to kill FPS in many games. Where is my EAX going to be? EAX won't work - period. Environmental sounds are about to be kicked out the door. /Endquote
This is not entirely accurate...audio rendering in Vista has nothing to do with DirectX10, unlike previous versions of DirectX/Windows. This is what has resulted in the breaking of EAX and other formats that required DirectSound3D found in earlier versions of DirectX. Creative apparently has already patched this problem in Vista using ALchemy. Creative is hoping that the OpenAL architecture will catch on again in Vista, which will provide what EAX no longer can. Incidently there are games out there that used OpenAL...and as far as I understand these games work fine in Vista, including surround sound.
Basically, Vista has reworked how sound and video operate now, and in the long run this new way is far superior. Previously when a video driver or audio driver crashed this resulted in a BSOD and forced a reboot. This is simply no longer the case in Vista. This is also why there is no DirectX 10 support for XP...it would require a service pack in itself to allow for DirectX10 compatibility, which would require a significant amount of resources to accomplish...resources that are being used in other things, like Vista...
The Vista audio renderer operates much more efficiently in Vista now, so software rendering wont impact performance near as much as it did in XP, especially on a computer that is already fast enough to handle gaming in Vista. Incidently, it has been shown that Aero Glass has no discernable impact on frames per second in gaming compared to the non-glass Aero interface.
So in the short run....a lot of current games will have a 'flat audio environment', and will require some hacking to get proper surround sound working again.
In the long run....Vista will provide a more stable platform, and once new games featuring environmental audio support under Vista start replacing the older ones on our drives, the lack of support for EAX will become a thing of the past.
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Maybe, but that is assuming your card supports OpenAL. I can remember playing Doom 3, etc and not having 3D audio on my NForce. I heard many other cards don't support OpenAL either. If they can fix that little problem, then I think things might be OK.
-S
PS. Same thing happened on a friends VIA based board - No 3d Audio support under Doom 3.