Been playing around with the Vista RTM all weekend.

Loaded up Diablo 2 for a little multiplayer action and immediately noticed something was wrong. My rear speakers wouldn't work! I checked the creative/Windows speaker properties to make sure they were 5.1 (In XP they have a habit of defaulting to 2.1) but suprisingly it was still set to 5.1.

I check the Diablo 2 properties and whatdoyaknow, the 3D Sound effects options is greyed out. 🙁

And so it begins....

Personally I think it's great that Microsoft is breaking Creative's one last hold on the gaming sound market because Creative is a terrible company. Creative has been stifling innovation in the sound card market for over 10 years buy buying out or suing into the ground all of their competitors, and strong-arming game developers into including support for their proprietary EAX API so that gamers continue to think they need a Creative product in order to fully experience those games.

I've been Creative-free for about 3 years now and haven't missed it one bit. EAX is just another layer of effects on top of DirectSound3D, so most games run fine in 5.1 on Windows XP with a sound card that supports DS3D but not EAX 4 or 5. This is due in large part to sound SDK's like Miles which make games run well on any sound hardware by giving developers a common interface for sound programming.

Breaking of legacy DS3D support is a bummer though - hopefully someone will write a wrapper or something.

I'm using onboard Realtek sound right now (works great and has good DS3D support) but I'm thinking of picking up one of these: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Ite … N82E16829156002 because I have Dolby/DTS digital-capable 5.1 speakers that would work well with it.

I read a post on a forum a couple of days ago that stated that Creative was working on a wrapper. I don't know if it's just for EAX or all DirectSound3D games though.

Hmm... On the subject of games designed for Vista, it looks like Creative is trying to push OpenAL on game developers as the new API that will give them a path to EAX. Bummer 🙁

The sound card I linked does not yet have OpenAL acceleration either, but Auzentech is supposedly pushing C-Media to add support to the 8788 driver.

Dang, Creative has had OPENAL support for a long time now. WTF are these other sound card companies doing? (I guess being lazy.)

Dang, Creative has had OPENAL support for a long time now. WTF are these other sound card companies doing? (I guess being lazy.)

Actually, Creative is being extremely sluggish (as usual) in implementing Vista drivers as well.

By contrast, a lot of the other companies like Realtek are marching along with good Vista drivers (probably not with OpenAL support though).

As far as OpenAL, nVidia was the only other supporter and Creative backstabbed them out of the sound market by buying Sensaura.

The new Creative Vista drivers finally worked for my Audigy. I have not had a chance to see what is missing or not working properly, yet. Maybe over the long weekend I'll get some time to look.

Some news: http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2006/11/28/Vista … _eax_after_all/

http://www.custompc.co.uk/custompc/news/98878 … -after-all.html

However, older Audigy and Sound Blaster sound cards will not be supported initially, which means that the only way to get high-quality positional audio in Windows Vista is to buy an X-Fi.

huh. I would have figured that there are more Audigy cards out there than X-Fi cards.....Guess this is why I'm not a business man.

It's not like a driver that enables DirectSound3D to work in Vista is going to make people go out and buy X-Fi cards. Hell, most people probably won't even notice since most of 'em use 2.1 audio setups.

Indeed, I thought the Audigy range was quite a big seller. Marketing men don't always/ever? do what we'd like 'em to!

finally creativelabs has announced the ALchemy project. it seemes to be some sort of directsound3d wrapper for windows vista:

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.

you can find it here.
iam really looking forward into this but the question is, why is it not compatible to older soundcards (like audigy 1-4) that also supports openAL 1.1 ? 😒

I am not a great fan of Creative Labs. 😜

The download came out yesterday (project page has been up for about 2 months I think).

Supposedly you can copy the dsound.dll manually into your game directory and it will work on Audigy cards. Haven't bothered testing it yet since I'm going through my games identifying which ones use EAX. Pretty painfull process.....