News Vista will support EAX after all

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2006/11/28/Vista_will_support_eax_after_all/

 

But surely this new translation from DirectX to OpenAL will have to be done on the CPU, so that will take up clock cycles and reduce performance? Or maybe it will be done on the sound card, does anyone know more details on this?

 

As of right now, details are horrendously murky.

My understanding of the new Vista driver models tells me that this will be converted via CPU, as you can't even get the sound data off the chip until it's OpenAL. So you'll still suffer the same (if not worse) performance hit, but at least you'll have decent sound. Therefore, the power of the X-Fi would also not be the reason why it's the chosen one and others aren't...

 

This is a good thing as it removes the need for expensive sound cards for good positional audio. Creatives standard of positional audio is only supported by creative sound cards which is annoying as they happen to be crap for listening to music. By doing the positional audio on the CPU a better card can be used without any loss in the quality of the positional audio.

 

what other hardware vista wont support? this is getting real bad, this remembers me the time when i had to scrap my lovely functional scanner because of XP .

 

Looks like I'll be hanging onto XP for a while. . .

Off topic, I'm recalling how my A+ hardware teacher constantly insists that Microsoft created EAX and every other good thing that happened to PCs withing the last 3 decades. . .

L J

 

Right, well I've got an Audigy 4 card I cant get working Vista, and now it looks like it never will. It's maybe 9 month old and was bought as a cheaper way of getting good EAX support.

Clearly, Creative have had the last of my money, so if I need a new card, what are the recommended non-Creative cards?

 

Bit did a review of a decent one not too long ago, look through the hardware archives.

I still see no advantage to vista.

 

Thanks for the info

This doesn't sound too good. I'm just glad I've never given into the EAX hype and just stuck with on-board sound. The only time I'd buy an add-in sound card would be for sound recording or other pro-audio usage. But I certainly wouldn't buy a Creative card for that anyway.

Despite any hardware compatibility, or any other issues, I'll definitely be getting Vista pre-installed on my next PC at work (early next year). As for my home PC, I think I'll wait until Vista has been out for at least 6 months and then just get a whole new PC that's fully Vista compatible. I'll be well over due for an upgrade by then anyway.

 

oh thank god i have x-fi, this is a nightmare im glad im clear of

 

http://www.digit-life.com/articles2/esi-julia/

this is ment to be awsome when hooked up to a nice external DAC even though it has relativly low cost. No good for surround sound though if thats your thing... personaly Im of the opinion that with good enough stereo headphones suround sound is a usless gimick. But some people like speakers wherupon it may be of use.

 

The article says older cards won't be supported initially.

 

So I should go with out any sound for 3 months, then without EAX for another, what...6 or 9 months...?

 

what about the number of cores we have on processors today 1-2 or 4 cores plus hyperthreading on top of that which we didnt have back in the day of amd-xp and p4

say if we have 2 cores 1 core be maxed out for the game the other could be used for sound+sorting out back ground data surly microsoft have thort this one threw.

or say we get the 4 core cpus that has just come out, and get them 6 months down the line which surely be more than powerful then the games need so it could be something like the main game on core 1+2 and sound+ back ground dataon core 3 and physics on core 4 .

 

Well, yeah, that sucks.

 

tbh If someone is that into gaming that they really believe this will make a huge difference to their frame rate and gaming experience they should try stopping other background tasks such as teamspeak and IRC.. Looking at todays pc's they can hadle all that brunt and if all they are doing is going for a frame rate then switching off the sound engine would help a lot...

 

Well i dont think it has that lot of impact on fps in games. I mean not that you notice a 2fps difference in gameplay anyway. If your (onboard) sound (card) supports dolby 5.1 then youre better of anyway becasue almost all games suport 5.1 surround nowadays. And i really dont notice any difference between EAX and 5.1s on my systems with and without a xfi card.

And dont blame it on vista. but on the driver support from Creative. They need to make EAX work on vista. And not the way around...

 

I largely agree with you Obiwan that the problem lies with Creative, and furthermore it is a problem they have been aware about from sometime. I can't help but feel that it's part apathy and part marketing - trying to shift a few more X-Fi cards.

However, I would say that I noticed an improvement in both sound quality and effect, and a slight improvement in FPS (or less stutter) when I went to an Audigy 4 card from an onboard AC97 device.

Suddenly, I could distinguish footsteps and their direction in the likes of BF2...

 

well it seems like the best bet would be to just wait until creative bring out a vista based Sound card that sets the standard for game development now that any new games made will not be using EAX as non will want the performance hit

 

goddamn, so my Audigy wont have any EAX support in Vista? f**k u, Microsoft... yes, MS, not Creative... well probably both... but its MS that setup the Dx10 driver architecture to have a different model....

i bet u MS talked to Creative agreeing on 'hey, lets just support xfi so creative can release brand new more expensive cards to work properly on vista!'