Onboard audio better with Vista

gpett

I ran across a cool paragraph in a recent Anadtech.com article:



"One area that deserves a bit of extra attention is the multimedia options. In the past, just about everyone agreed that any high-end system -- particularly for gamers -- required a discrete audio card. The situation has changed quite dramatically with Windows Vista, as Microsoft has moved to a professional model for sound. Audio drivers are no longer in Ring 0, which should prevent them from causing system instabilities. The good news is that the new Universal Audio Architecture (UAA) makes integrated audio almost as good as discrete; the bad news is that all the extra effects in most current/older games got lost. If a game supports OpenAL (Q4, Prey, BF2142, S.T.A.L.K.E.R., etc.) then you still get full hardware accelerated 3D effects, and while Creative's new ALchemy Project is working to extend EAX support for older games, many titles are still not on the officially supported list. Also worth mentioning is that ALchemy is currently only for X-Fi cards (not including the Xtreme Audio version); Audigy users may get support in the future, but at present they are left out in the cold. Game developers are currently designing Vista specific features such as offloading audio computations onto a separate core/thread, providing increased flexibility for audio effects, so long-term we may see a shift in the audio market to the point where virtually any solution will offer the same overall quality."



Basicaly, it means Microsoft does not trust the drivers of current audio cards.  IT people have known that over the years creative drivers have caused a ton of issues.  I am glad Microsoft put their foot down and forced creative to make a quality driver that is not recycling 20 years worth of old code.



Now where is that onboard soundstorm high quality audio that used to be built on motherboards?

rsammy

You know, I can't ever remember buying a sound card for my computer builds. I just think onboard sound suits me fine.

Zikiel

So essentially, my games will lag like hell, and look not so great, but sound freakin awesome while doing it? I think I'll pass on this one.

n25philly

Originally posted by Zikiel

So essentially, my games will lag like hell, and look not so great, but sound freakin awesome while doing it? I think I'll pass on this one.

huh?

gpett

Originally posted by Zikiel

So essentially, my games will lag like hell, and look not so great, but sound freakin awesome while doing it? I think I'll pass on this one.

Yeah what?

Spathotan

Originally posted by Zikiel

So essentially, my games will lag like hell, and look not so great, but sound freakin awesome while doing it? I think I'll pass on this one.

Yea, if you have a 5 year old processor, RAM, and video card,  and a $200 sound card. Not to mention sound have basically nothing to do with how youre games will perform. Using onboard audio I was averaging 231 FPS in Fear, after I added my Sound Blaster X-Fi ExtremeGamer I was averaging 231 FPS.

baff

Originally posted by gpett

Originally posted by Zikiel

So essentially, my games will lag like hell, and look not so great, but sound freakin awesome while doing it? I think I'll pass on this one.

Yeah what?

Onboard sound uses CPU cycles if running high quality sound effects like EAX. The central processor does all the calculations instead of the dedicated soundcard.

With the specific example of EAX, this is rather alot of processing. Depending on your system and the game you are running on it, this may well cause lag.

gpett

Originally posted by baff

Originally posted by gpett

Originally posted by Zikiel

So essentially, my games will lag like hell, and look not so great, but sound freakin awesome while doing it? I think I'll pass on this one.

Yeah what?

Onboard sound uses CPU cycles if running high quality sound effects like EAX. The central processor does all the calculations instead of the dedicated soundcard.

With the specific example of EAX, this is rather alot of processing. Depending on your system and the game you are running on it, this may well cause lag.

First of all.  EAX is not supported in Vista. OpenAL is supported in vista.  It designed to seperate audio cpu cycles into different threads.  It allows modern multi core CPUs to take advantage of the fact that they have multiple cores.



So, sounds to me microsoft is stamping out old buggy drivers and inefficient EAX from becoming widespread when it is an inferior technology.

Spathotan

Originally posted by gpett

Originally posted by baff

Originally posted by gpett

Originally posted by Zikiel

So essentially, my games will lag like hell, and look not so great, but sound freakin awesome while doing it? I think I'll pass on this one.

Yeah what?

Onboard sound uses CPU cycles if running high quality sound effects like EAX. The central processor does all the calculations instead of the dedicated soundcard.

With the specific example of EAX, this is rather alot of processing. Depending on your system and the game you are running on it, this may well cause lag.

First of all.  EAX is not supported in Vista. OpenAL is supported in vista.  It designed to seperate audio cpu cycles into different threads.  It allows modern multi core CPUs to take advantage of the fact that they have multiple cores.



So, sounds to me microsoft is stamping out old buggy drivers and inefficient EAX from becoming widespread when it is an inferior technology. Very True. Not only that, but games that do support EAX STILL sound just as good as they do on EAX supported operating systems. And for those very few games that support EAX but not OpenAL, Creative has a program called Creative Alchemy, that detects said games and can translate the audio files to OpenAL, it takes all of 1 minute to find the program, download it, and translate the audio.