Creative releasing own audio layer for Vista? | The Coffeehouse

PeterF
Early Adopter

Is it so hard to write an audio driver for the Audigy sound cards that Creative has written an entire hardware abstraction layer for Vista to support multi-channel support in games?

Larry Osterman, are the reasons on the Creative Alchemy Website true? It cannot be that by developing an almost realtime audio layer you would cause such a big problem for Creative and games studio's?

Peter (unlucky owner of an Audigy 2 ZS Pro card)

cescotto

We had to expect this: vista implements in its audio stack some new features that before were managed by the drivers. For example a "third party" solution like EAX for games audio now has been replaced with a Microsoft's implementation in dx10.

This unfortunately comes at the expense of performance (especially latency) because those features are now software-implemented while on expensive audiocards (like Creative's) those features were previously hardware-implemented. This is why the only way for creative to get around the software implementation is reimplementing part of the audio layer.

Fortunately all of this comes at the advantage of the average users that won't have to spend a lot of money on expensive soundcards anymore, since most of the work now is done by windows.

littleguru
<3 Seattle

And removes the random BSOD fired by the Creative drivers Wink

Sven Groot
My name has 9 letters. Coincidence? I think not...

I wish they'd first just release drivers that don't glitch every time the system gets under load (the newest beta drivers for the X-Fi are actually worse than the previous ones in this regard, unfortunately the previous ones are time-bombed so they don't work anymore) and where basic stuff like SPDIF passthrough actually works as expected.

Then they can worry about their precious EAX.

cescotto

littleguru wrote:
And removes the random BSOD fired by the Creative drivers

I remember buying a few years ago a SB Live! for my PC, it never worked decently with its drivers: its buggy drivers started eating more and more CPU when the OS was running for a long time (and I usually keep my pcs turned on for entire months).

Fortunately I found some unofficial drivers called kX audio drivers that worked perfectly and they are still the most advanced drivers I've ever seen.

http://kxproject.lugosoft.com/shots.php?language=en

simply amazing!

The audio flow customization is the coolest thing I've ever seen, it's all graphically programmable and you can also insert elements created by yourself (it has its own programming language).

It lets you take any input (from software or from line-in (and as you may know every jack can work both as a line-in and line-out)), also multi-channel input, and transform it like you want and output it somewhere else. The most customizable drivers ever!

Tom Servo
W-hat?

That abstraction layer is supposed to bring back hardware acceleration for games, but as I've also predicted, it will likely go around the whole new audio subsystem because Creative are fvcking idiots and too stupid to write a driver for the new model. I'd even go as far to wager that their hardware is crap. In the past, they've blamed inaccurate buffer position reporting, and guess whose responsibility this would be.

--edit: Just tried it. Of no use for all other applications, since it only works in Game mode.

Ray6

cescotto wrote:

Fortunately all of this comes at the advantage of the average users that won't have to spend a lot of money on expensive soundcards anymore, since most of the work now is done by windows.

... but won't they have to spend a lot of money on expensive machines to compenate for the new software architecture?