OnasiThis is a press release that says basically nothing. Come on, Creative.


That’s one of the things Microsoft can definitively be blamed for. Re-writing the entire Windows audio stack in Vista so that HW acceleration of audio is basically not viable sure was a move.

stimpy88I was there too, I also read the reason for MS's decision, that Creative's drivers were the No1 reason for bluescreen crashing in Windows, next to printers and scanners. And yes, MS went nuclear and that was a massive shame that Windows Audio has never recovered from.

MS should lay a framework API for hardware accelerated audio inside Direct-X and design a strict driver foundation to utilise it. But sadly MS has almost no competent coders/devs, so they don't know how to do it, and probably couldn't get the budget for it anyway, even if they wanted to. The interesting thing is that the XBox consoles have had hardware Audio for years now, so there must be an API, MS just refuses to make it public. Maybe Windows 12, but I won't hold my breath.

DudeBeFishingMicrosoft managed to break Minecraft's directional audio, and then marked the bug report working as intended. It's still not fixed. Do you really there's a chance of them implementing it into DirectX properly?

Prima.VeraMicrosoft is too incompetent, and too callous to care about 3D Hardware/Software sound in their OSes at the moment. Now the focus lies with the shitty AI gimmick, the new 2nd coming trend.
The quality 3D Sound went extinct with Windows XP sadly.
Still funny and ironic how ancient games such as Unreal 1/2, DeusEx, Thief, Half-Life or FEAR still sounds 1 millions time better than the latest AAAAAA Games that have budget in the hundreds of millions.

Prima.VeraMicrosoft is too incompetent, and too callous to care about 3D Hardware/Software sound in their OSes at the moment. Now the focus lies with the shitty AI gimmick, the new 2nd coming trend.
The quality 3D Sound went extinct with Windows XP sadly.
Still funny and ironic how ancient games such as Unreal 1/2, DeusEx, Thief, Half-Life or FEAR still sounds 1 millions time better than the latest AAAAAA Games that have budget in the hundreds of millions.

OneMoarMicrosoft is many things Incompetent is not one of them

Sorry kids but Hardware Acceleration for Audio makes no sense when cpus are fast enough and more flexiable this was the entire reason it was dropped cpus got fast enough for not to matter and maintaining it was a stablity nightmware (see creative)

EAX/HTRF/spatial audio processing can be easily done in software and are computationally irreleavent on modern platforms

OneMoarEAX/HTRF/spatial audio processing can be easily done in software and are computationally irreleavent on modern platforms

Prima.VeraYeah, they are so easy to implement that in the past 15+ years, NO GAMES what so ever have any quality 3D Sound implementation.
5.1 Dolby or simmilar, IS NOT 3D sound. Not by a million miles.

Ex of simmilar 3D sounds (ASMR 3D Binaural) that the ancient games were using via A3D 2.0 or later EAX 5.0:

OneMoaryou seem to be confusing game devlopers with microsoft you do NOT need a dedicated DSP to perform simple HTRF calculations \ biaural processing end of story
microsoft is not to blame for game devlopers being lazy

you might want to look up EAX's short commings before signing its praises by the time microsoft shitcanned directaudio basicly nobody was using it
btw open al still exists and is actively maintained here:
github.com/kcat/openal-soft

OneMoarCreative are the ones that Killed Hardware accelerated Audio OpenAL was there baby and they elected to drown it in the river (they bought OpenAL then slowly killed it)

all of this co-insided with Death of soundcards in general caused by AC97/HDA becomming common

addionally blaming microsoft because the entire industry moved away from dedicated audio hardware is wholly unfair and boarder line idiotic

tl:dr creative went full sith lord and paid the price for it they can rot in hell

Prima.VeraStop writing nonsense. A single vendor cannot control what Microsoft does and choose. You're writing crap.

See this:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_card#List_of_notable_sound_card_manufacturers
There are a lot of other sound card producers that could offer quality 3D sound (not the current fake and emulated shit), if the Microsoft would have provided a standardized 3d Sound API. They instead chose not to do it and let all the burden to game engine producers, to just emulate it as see see fit (they don't), or just use the overly crappy and flat Dolby, which is just a multi-speaker technology with ZERO tri dimensional sound and audio filters.
In all seriousness, nowadays sound in games is THAT BAD. There is absolutely NO DIFFERENCE at all compared to 20-30 years ago, when you were using ISA 16-bit sound cards.

P.S.
Ever heard of Quake 1? An almost 30 years old game. This is how it was sounding with OpenAL and shitty 22Khz sounds. That's right, 30 years old audio sounds better than the current games, hahaha: