Thread: No EAX, DirectSound, or DirectSound 3D support in Vista

Just got Windows Vista because my XP CD crapped out. Will definitely be sending it back to Microsoft so I can dual boot.

Microsoft got the brilliant idea to completely remove hardware support for DirectSound, EAX, and DirectSound 3D in Vista. While this is nice for those cheapies who don't give a crap about sound, it sucks for people who actually want their games and audio to sound great. Now the benefits of owning a sound card are next to nil. Microsoft's great idea is that now sound processing can be sent to the CPU. Those who own dual core's and so forth won't have any problem with sound processing is their thought.

My question is this. Since we have already removed sound processing from the CPU why take a step backwards and send it to the CPU? I want my CPU doing as little as possible which is why I have a video card, sound card, and perhaps a physics card.

This is a major bonehead move by Microsoft. Two thumbs down. Way down in the toilet.

This initially sounded so stupid I hesitated to swallow the story. What could possibly be the reasoning for this? A quick search revealed that it's totally true and completly obnoxious. I run XP-64 and will continue to do so until a better Windows version is released. Vista is not that version.

However, to remedy your issue, check out http://connect.creativelabs.com/alch.../AllItems.aspx
Also, search for the "Universal" version, which apparently works on most cards.

I suppose this means I'll have to re-write my long standing Sound Manager aspect of my Engine. As if I didn't have enough else to do.

Hehehe, this is old news. Microsoft was looking for more things to rip out of Vista (legacy code as they call it), but couldn't due to programs and applications still using it.
I don't expect support for DirectSound to ever come back. Microsoft stripped it, they're idiots, but they stripped it because they didn't want it...
Another reason to stay away from Vista.

Well I was just getting ready to port my DirectMusic code to DirectSound but won't try now. I guess I'll start using OpenAL for my sound instead of coding my own.

I believe games that use OpenAL, Miles, or any other 3rd party library will work just fine since their audio is done in software. It still seems like a giant leap backwards and I bet Creative and other audio card manufacturers are ticked. Essentially Microsoft just ruined sound card manuf sales and invalidated the need for a separate sound card.

Ridiculous.

I knew something was fishy in the 2005 updates to the DX9.0c SDK when they did not include DirectMusic. I found them in a sep download but I should have guessed this was coming.

Maybe MS feels that if they can hinder the performance of computers enough people will think upgrading to the latest and greatest OS is the answer. I can't believe that's true and it's quite a cynical viewpoint but this step backwards stuff really sucks.

The better computers get, the worse the software becomes.

EDIT:

The good new is that Creative has responded with OpenAL which I'm assuming their sound engineers worked on to achieve basically the same effects that they did in hardware. Even better news is that this is open source and free to anyone wishing to use it. I've seen a lot of posts about OpenAL here but never made the connection that I'd have to switch to it.

The old Creative mixer is now in sound properties and is a tabbed dialog. But thankfully EAX effects, bass, treble, and multi-source volume input and output are still available. Creative did a very good job responding to this issue. Just ran my old NFSU 2 and after a bit a of tweaking the game sounds just like it did on XP.

http://openal.org/openal_vista.html

I really think that MS is going to shoot itself in the foot with this. Or rather, it already did, but the pain just hasn't arrived yet.

OpenAL is like OpenGL - it's a complete alternative that hardware developers can support to bring direct hardware processing to the API. Alternatively, there's software processing, with the obvious tradeoffs. As the linked article described, there was also the third option of translating the OpenAL calls to DirectSound3d calls, but that option is obviously out, now.
I think at the moment only Creative supports hardware OpenAL, but I suppose Aureal won't be far behind.

As for ALchemy, that's basically an implementation of DirectSound3d that translates the calls to OpenAL.

DirectMusic?

Originally Posted by Bubba

I believe games that use OpenAL, Miles, or any other 3rd party library will work just fine since their audio is done in software.

AFAIK, OpenAL can be (and is on some sound cards, although I don't know how many) hardware accelerated, just like DirectSound was.

Of course, but DirectSound will not be hardware accelerated in Vista, and will rely on Vista's internal pathetic muxer (ie no surround). You have to use OpenAL to get hardware support; not DirectSound which most games use.

So far as I understand, no EAX, 3D or hardware features are available with DirectSound/Music under Vista.