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Sound Off On Vista


Australia, January 29, 2007 - "Windows Vista and DirectX 10 signal a new era in gaming," so says Mark Walker, Microsoft columnist and gaming evangelist. And he's but one of a chorus of voices from within and without Microsoft touting the merits of the next generation of Windows when it comes to gaming.

So imagine your surprise when you fire up one of your favourite games in Vista - say World of Warcraft or Prey - only to find your fancy EAX-endowed soundcard and 5.1 surround speakers are dribbling out flat, unenhanced stereo sound. Then, in a vain attempt to spruce up the audio by enabling EAX, you get a nice taut error message saying EAX is not detected on your hardware. What's going on?
Welcome to the world of Vista audio. And a brave new world it is.

The root of all these problems? Microsoft's Windows team made the bold decision to rewrite the Vista audio stack from the ground up, and in doing so they removed hardware acceleration for DirectSound. That's right. They took hardware support away from the most ubiquitous sound API implemented in games over the past several years.

As a result, in many of today's games, all those feature-laden sound cards, with their multiple channels, audio extensions and hardware accelerated processors, become little better than common garden variety on-board sound running in software mode. Naturally, Creative Labs (amongst others) is pissed.





The new Windows audio stack's new strengths belied a critical weakness: much of the audio stack was run in kernel mode, right in the guts of Windows. This meant that if - heaven forbid - something went wrong and the audio stack crashed, there was a good chance it would drag the rest of Windows down with it.

According to the blog of Larry Osterman, veteran engineer at Microsoft, "the amount of code that runs in the kernel (coupled with buggy device drivers) causes the audio stack to be one of the leading causes of Windows reliability problems."

And when Windows crashes, whatever the cause, who gets blamed? Microsoft. So after years of reprisals from angry users like us, the Windows team finally threw their arms in the air in exasperation and decided to entirely rewrite the audio stack from scratch for Longhorn. The project started in 2002 following the launch of Windows XP, and we're finally seeing the fruit of it today with Windows Vista.

I wont be getting Vista for at least a year so hopefully many of the bugs and issues will be taken care of with the first or even second Service Pack release.

Ok they blame sound for crashing windows and wanted to fix that. Thats great but to take functionality away form hardware thats been around for years is just wrong. Yet one more reason to avoid vista in the near future. I want to see if this issue will be addressed in sp1 or some other manner, or well it be left to the hardware designers to make different sound cards and drivers to get around this leaving older sound cards useless.

See this is what is driving me mad with Vista, and other M$ software, they reguleraly apply new ideas and tings but do not think about how it will affect the customer. I congratulate them for trying new ways of doing things, but customers = #1, and if it hurts the customer, it hurts you.

Eh. Microsoft could repackage Windows 3.1 and give it a new name like, say, 'Windows for <Bleeps>' and people would buy it. They don't need to care about the customer. Where else is the (average) customer going to go?

TD

vista won't support EAX through directsound ... OpenAL (which IS supported by vista and many games) does provide hardware acceleration on all SB cards -- not just X-fi.

There is waaaaay much hyperbole on vista and it's mostly perpetuated by ignorance. It's worth it to look further than flames on message boards and learn the real issues.

I figured they had other acceleration, but to not support what I would consider a populer method just still seams dumb.

Gator, you have confused me. Vista does or does not support EAX?

Grifter wrote:Gator, you have confused me. Vista does or does not support EAX?

Vista supports EAX via the OpenAl API not DirectSound.

they removed support for DirectSound which has been a common standard. but there is support through OpenAl. Note that not all games support OpenAl, but I suspect any newer game dose now, and most if not all new games will support it. I still think its very lazy on the part of M$. I well not say this is a critical flaw, but its more annoying if you try to play games what don't support OpenAl.

correct - you could say DirectSound got "deprecated" ... as they say.

So, older games that had EAX support will not have it in Vista.
Say Jedi Academy, which I am still playing, and is 3.5 yrs old and based on an 7.5 yr old game engine...I bet it doesn't have EAX in Vista.

Jedi Master wrote:So, older games that had EAX support will not have it in Vista.
Say Jedi Academy, which I am still playing, and is 3.5 yrs old and based on an 7.5 yr old game engine...I bet it doesn't have EAX in Vista.

Heh..all the more reason NOT to get Vista right away.

jedi, if it uses DirectSound, you are correct. It's not so much an EAX issue as it is a DirectSound issue.

Accidental Double Post

Sound off on Vista....how is that different from now......sound off in CoX?

Although OpenAL has arguably replaced DirectSound3D, particularly in many modern PC Games (e.g Battlefield 2142, Doom3, Quake 4, Prey, etc ...), there are hundreds of older PC games that support DirectSound3D and EAX technology --- all of these games will sound empty and lifeless on Vista. As most DS3D games only enable 3D Audio (and EAX) if a hardware accelerator is present, most of these games will be reduced to a stereo output


The good news is that the Creative ALchemy Project allows you to run your favorite DirectSound3D games on Windows Vista as the developers intended - with full hardware accelerated 3D Audio and EAX support! This is done by translating DirectSound calls into OpenAL. In order for this to happen, a couple of files need to be installed into each game directory. This is handled automatically by the ALchemy installer - but can also be performed manually by advanced users.


Source:

http://preview.creativelabs.com/alchemy/default.aspx

I see 2 problems with forcing some other company to fix the problem

1: That company can't change the OS itself to fix it so needs to mae a workaround, and any workaround now well cost you more CPU cycles. To convert one format to another is more work on the system. Not much but it is. This leaded to possable way to crash a system. Doing these conversions could end up hitting a snag some ware and is just one more thing that could go wrong. Would have been easer

2: Quality could go down. realize how many sounds in some games come through at once, then have to be converted and then the sound card gets to deal with it. there is a possibility for sounds to be out of order or late and maybe not as good a quality. When you have a 1/2 a second in that fps to turn and realize you are in trouble, well when the sound is late telling you something is there, could be enough for you to be tost. Talking VERY short times here of course, but it may be enough to screw up some games for people.

now note this is based on my thinking considering I have not read up on the conversion method, but would defentlay be some of the thinking going through the developers heads to. there is also the other fun thing of a built in sound card or whatever also dose no get this effect, so its dependent on the sound card. so again, I may have bought a amazing sound card, but that card may not have this conversion. Again just one more thing M$ forcing upgradeds if you want to play specific games with good sound. This is what I will call a small mark against Vista as I do understand that we do end to move forward and can't always be backwards compatible. but on something that is not relay old, and is still found in newer games, you would have figured this would not have been cut.

O o a side note, here at EDS, there is large numbers of jokes going around and such about getting vista. lots of people asking have you installed vista yet joking aorund. The usual response is "do I look dumb" or something to that nature. But the majority if not every one has agreed that they are not going near Vista until its been out there for a bit and there a lot of bug fixing and such done, especialy when it comes to the possibility of the Os del your programs.

caution is one thing, but where I work, EDS does our computer contracting -- we're still using Win2K ... I'd kill for XP at work.

Hey Gator, what company do you work for.

and as for win2000, Its most likely your company not wanting to upgrade. EDS is all XP now lol. Takes forever to approve a OS here as they test the hell out of it, but its most likely your work place not wanting to upgrade costs. Hell I have heard os some places using Windows NT still.

Gator wrote:caution is one thing, but where I work, EDS does our computer contracting -- we're still using Win2K ... I'd kill for XP at work.

What a small world. I worked for EDS from 1999-2002.