Creative Enables Hardware Accelerated 3D Audio in Vista

[Kougar]

OpenAL wrapper allows X-Fi users to take advantage of 3D sound in Windows Vista

Creative Labs has opened up the doors to its ALchemy Project to enable hardware acceleration for DirectSound and EAX audio algorithms in Microsoft’s upcoming Windows Vista. The Alchemy Project is currently in its beta stages and intends to work around Microsoft’s audio limitations in Windows Vista due to the removal of the Hardware Abstraction Layer, or HAL.

Microsoft’s removal of the HAL removes the software layer required by digital signal processors to enable hardware acceleration for various 3D audio algorithms including DirectSound3D and EAX in pre-Vista games. Nevertheless, digital signal processors that support OpenAL can still take advantage of hardware audio acceleration.

More info and details can be found here (http://www.dailytech.com/Creative+Enables+Hardware+Accelerated+3D+Audio+in+ Vista/article5812.htm)

[skootyloops]

Good news for those who want good sound and want to run vista. :)

[PP Mguire]

Bad news for onboard users who use HAL still.

[Kougar]

Bad news for onboard users who use HAL still.

HAL is only a software abstraction layer built into the OS. Last I check my onboard sound worked just fine in Vista without it... ;)

[PP Mguire]

It works, but without 3d hardware accelerated sound :P

[Kougar]

You don't get hardware accelerated sound with onboard sound anyway. It's all offloaded onto the CPU ;)

[DragonMaster]

Yes, with onboard, the computer claims that the controller is hardware DirectSound, etc capable, but the driver is sending the load to the CPU just like onboard ethernet, no matter what the codec is, the chipset has the PCI to codec controller.

[PP Mguire]

You still get Directsound and all that good stuff, with this you wont. And besides, most Creative users dont know how to switch everything over to OpenAL anyways.,

[Kougar]

Hmm. It still sounds like it's for the better though. HAL is old DOS technology that needed to go. UAA is designed to minimize the load on the CPU, and if the driver support is there then everything should be kosher anyway. Unless I am still missing something... I'd given this a read through.

http://www.dailytech.com/Underneath+Microsofts+Universal+Audio+Architecture +/article5821.htm (http://www.dailytech.com/Underneath+Microsofts+Universal+Audio+Architecture +/article5821.htm)

[PP Mguire]

Eh, not like i really care anyways. I wont be using Vista for a while and i should have an X-FI by the time i upgrade. Its just alot of people will not be able to hear all the voices in games with their onboard. Not a big deal thogh.

[DragonMaster]

But since there's no DSound, it will not matter if there's 2 voices or 64, it's all going to be mixed by your CPU. They're giving uses for quad cores.

If I ever upgrade, what I'm going to miss the most is ASIO and Kernel Streaming. All that stuff to bypass the crappy Windows audio system now doesn't work anymore.

[Kougar]

Well, prove to me the new system is crappy. UAA is compeltely new and has some fairly good features built into it already... Since it was designed to minimize the CPU load, it will at least work much more efficiently than XP's system ever did. It'll be interesting to see by how much.

[DragonMaster]

It's still worse than hardware sound tho.

[Xero (1)ne]

I'm still using my SB Live! with KX drivers :smile: These drivers sound much better than regular creative drivers, imo.

Offloaded to the CPU or not, any 3D sound is still good for gamers.

[Schwarz]

I'll download their Alchemy Project thing.
I just installed vista so i'll see if its anything special...