Creative bypasses Vista and enables Hardwaresound

Sounds about right to me. That's all EAX does. Though obviously it's a little more complex than that. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy EAX, but certianly it's not "way more than a simple reverb". It is just that, a reverb.

 

how does work OpenAL?
I wish it does what the name's proximity with OpenGL suggests : if the effect is not supported in hardware then do it in software and result is the same . Is it like that?

and if EAX is purely proprietary and bolt on DirectSound or OpenAL.. well that's shit. 90% people use integrated sound anyway, isn't that a good enough incentive for developers to make sound effects that everybody will be able to hear? use OpenAL, if it doesn't have the nice reverb, well either do it custom and software only, or extend that OpenAL API and tell Creative, support that universal reverb API or eat shit.

I mean, CPUs are powerful enough to do various special effects and post-processing in real time on videos, but we should believe CPUs can't do much more with sound than the likes of doom2 and quake did?

 

From the site you linked (whatever is added in the parenthesis is my addition):

And from Creative's site:

Basically it adds a reverb effect to your voice.

All of which you listed are part (or an aftereffect if you will) of a reverb effect. My statement is 100% true. The same cannot be said about yours.

 

Willard, that's not what this is about. Go look for the effects used for guitar, for example. These:

are all not related to reverb in any way. Distortion is overdriving the signal into saturation, flanger and ring mod are something completely different, and delay/echo is repeating the signal portions (which is somewhat indirectly related to reverb, but still a different beast). Comb filtering is used for the emulation of the real-world interferance between multiple speakers, like in a 4x12" guitar box.

What I'm trying to say, a reverb algorithm in whatever form won't be able to give you these FX.

 

EAX is still no A3D.

 

EAX 5 is basically A3D.

Ok, perhaps "reverb" was too narrow, still EAX is just enviromental effects. While they add to a game in a postive way (I definately like EAX), you have to admit it exactly "make or break" an audio engine in a game. It really depends on the quality of the codec the engine uses (mp3, ogg, ac3 shouldn't be the norm) and how accuate the positioning is (using the API itself). Though I would prefer a developer to include EAX rather than not include EAX, it still is not a big downer if they don't support EAX.

 

I see Aureal's chips as game chips. That's all they were good for, honestly.

Creative's chips are dual purpose. They can game well, and they can make a wicked musician's card out of them. Aureal has nothing on E-MU's APUs in that respect. I'm not even sure that Vortex had a hardware MIDI synth (if it did, I'm sure it was VERY limited).

EAX was a way to make use of the advanced DSP inside EMU10K1-2, for more than just MIDI effect processing. It's totally obvious that's what EAX 1-3 or so is. Ironically, unless you used 2 speakers, Live! was not far behind in quality at all. Even with pre-baked reverb vs. the more interactive A3D 2.0. A3D 2.0 was largely done on the CPU, btw. It was a real killer for processors back then.

Aureal built a card to do neat audio placement thru aural tricks. Great for games, but the chip itself wasn't very flexible at all really and was very limited in its applications as a result.

I think X-Fi's GPU is totally still built to be dual purpose. It's obvious if you look at what it can do with inputs, outputs, effects, resampling, etc.

 

Just when I thought I'd seen it all.

Wow... just... wow.

 

You'd be surprised how many of us have not had issues with Creative. I for one have not and I've used a number of their cards.

 

Really I'd say Creative is on par with NVIDIA. Seriously. They both release drivers at about the same pace. Creative uses a unified driver release with their series' (Live!, Audigy, and X-Fi lines all have packages). NVIDIA is about the same; most of their older cards aren't supported by current driver releases. And like NV I suppose on some level, you get driver feature parity within product lines (within chip architectures, more accurately).

Their hardware is of pretty decent quality, especially post Audigy 1. The non-value/OEM boards are obviously built with quality in mind.

I haven't had issues with any Creative products since they got their initial Win2K driver issues figured out. Other than that, I know people had problems with SMP mobos vs. Live! back in the day (as in many years ago now).

The only quirks I've had with Audigy 2 ZS is occasional audio artifacts in some OpenAL-using Doom3-engine games. And apparently that's yet another PCI/chipset issue, this time with the bug-ridden nForce4.

 

Alchemy does only work in Vista 32bit atm, for those who care.

 

otoh, some of us have.

I bought an Audigy near launch. It took literally a year and half for the drivers to attain non-suck status.

That's why Sugarcoat's original statement ("always had very decent driver support") struck me as a stunner. I figured he probably wasn't into things at that time or had a short memory... or maybe he was sugar coating it.

Driver issues with Creative were very, very common for a long, long time which is why they still have such a bad rep. (Buying and then burying superior 3d audio tech earned them a bunch of bad mojo, too.)

But it seems they've finally gotten enough pride and dignity in their products to actually do some good. Took long enough.

 

Dammit. This is very sad.

I don't understand how 32/64 versions of Vista could be incompatible in this respect.

EDIT: Wait, where did you hear this? I checked the Alchemy forums and I saw someone with x64 Vista have some bugs with the EAX effects in Serious Sam 2, but the main audio still worked. I'm thinking this is just a specific Alchemy-Serious Sam 2 bug and not a x64 Vista incompatibility.

 

I wish creative would do holophonics in hardware

listen to the previews on this page(with headphones) holophonics has the best positioning ive heard
http://www.musicwatchavision.com/holophonicsstore.php