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Questions about the upcoming ASUS Xonar DX

O

Orbs

Member
The press release for this product is here: http://www.asus.com/news_show.aspx?id=10219

I've heard that it's due out on Monday, March 24th: http://www.techreport.com/discussions.x/14382

I want to know the following:
  1. 1. Does this mean, I can play OpenAL and Direct Sound games on Vista with hardware acceleration and get all the EAX effects and have the sound come out of an optical or S/PDIF output with Dolby Digital 5.1 encoding?

    2. Would DVD's/BD's pass digital audio over the optical or S/PDIF channel (my guess is 'yes' as most sound cards do this)?

    3. Is EAX 5.0 the highest EAX standard out there or are there effects this card won't support?

Thanks!
Jared
 
I too have been trying to find out this information with no real luck. Asus normally uses C-Media Oxygen HD chips for their sound cards, and I am unaware of C-Media having their own Alchemy-like implementation, nor am I aware of them having rights to EAX 3.0 or higher. At best it's somehow going to support EAX 5.0 (which yes, is the latest version) but I'm not going to buy for a second that it's hardware accelerated. C-Media's chips don't do hardware acceleration, and I doubt this has changed with an $89 product. The only thing that might be hardware accelerated is DDL, and even then I wouldn't count on that.
 
Guys... wake up....

I mean, if you use VISTA, there be no more HW Acceleration ANY MORE, Microsoft has closed the window literally forever in order to prevent that BSOD. What Creative and Asus doing now are both creating a software wrapper on the SW layer to revive the EAX and multi-channel audio on those games use the now abandened DirectSound instructions.

Back to Orb's quesitions, from my Xonar D2 experience:

1. Does this mean, I can play OpenAL and Direct Sound games on Vista with hardware acceleration and get all the EAX effects and have the sound come out of an optical or S/PDIF output with Dolby Digital 5.1 encoding?

----> YES and NO! Yes, you can play games with EAX and have the 5.1 sound output via SPDIF with DDL encoding, and No, neither ASUS nor Creative can provide HW acceleration anymore in VISTA. If Creative claims they can still provide HW acceleration, they'd be lying....

2. Would DVD's/BD's pass digital audio over the optical or S/PDIF channel (my guess is 'yes' as most sound cards do this)?

---> Yes and No. Yes, BD/DVD audio will definitely be able to pass over the optical or SPDIF. No, for BD high bit-rate Dolby TrueHD and DTS HD, it'll require SW player to work out the AACS content protection with ASUS, and it'll ONLY be able to pass out via HDMI. Current SPDIF's bandwidth is just not enough for that kind of high quality audio. (I leared this from AVSForum, lots of useful info can be found there...^_^)

3. Is EAX 5.0 the highest EAX standard out there or are there effects this card won't support?
--> Yes, EAX 5 is the highest now but is currently exclusively owned by Creative, and they tend not to release it to anyone. From my understandings and my personal experience as an owner of Xonar D2, ASUS is enabling this EAX thing by directing the commands to their proprietary DS3D GX 2.0 (DirectSound3D Game Extention... gee.. that's long).

The new drivers from Asus has all enabled this EAX5 thing for existing Xonar D2/D2X. I've compared it with my friends with X-FI, I honestly can't notice any difference between the 2, but it feels good that I can check the EAX5 box in game audio setting page now.. haha.


 
Originally posted by: lilohtpc3
Guys... wake up....

I mean, if you use VISTA, there be no more HW Acceleration ANY MORE, Microsoft has closed the window literally forever in order to prevent that BSOD. What Creative and Asus doing now are both creating a software wrapper on the SW layer to revive the EAX and multi-channel audio on those games use the now abandened DirectSound instructions.

Back to Orb's quesitions, from my Xonar D2 experience:

1. Does this mean, I can play OpenAL and Direct Sound games on Vista with hardware acceleration and get all the EAX effects and have the sound come out of an optical or S/PDIF output with Dolby Digital 5.1 encoding?

----> YES and NO! Yes, you can play games with EAX and have the 5.1 sound output via SPDIF with DDL encoding, and No, neither ASUS nor Creative can provide HW acceleration anymore in VISTA. If Creative claims they can still provide HW acceleration, they'd be lying....
Click to expand...
Just so we're clear, Creative can and does provide HW acceleration through OpenAL. OpenAL native games get it automatically, DS3D games get it via the Alchemy wrapper translating the DS3D calls to OpenAL. Other than the translations, that's all done in hardware.

I am curious as to how Asus is getting away with EAX 5 however, since it sounds like this isn't some kind of typo. Creative has patents on that stuff, you can't just implement EAX 5 without Creative's permission.
 
Originally posted by: Orbs
My guess is they licensed it from Creative for some fee, but I could be wrong 🙂
Click to expand...
I haven't seen any press releases or financial transactions that would back that possibility. If Creative made a deal like this, it would be a big news for the investors, Creative would have said something.
 
Creative has finally said something
With respect for you and your readers, we wish to share this important information. With its recent driver updates, Asus is misleading its customers by suggesting that its sound cards now support EAX 5. Asus sound cards do not support EAX 5, nor do they support EAX 3 or EAX 4. There are a small number of PC game titles that specifically query the audio device on the system to see if EAX 5 is available before they will attempt to render more than 64 3D simultaneous audio voices. The new Asus drivers are falsely reporting EAX 5 capabilities in order to get these games to ouptut 3D audio on Asus sound cards. Asus customers are not getting a genuine EAX Advanced HD experience with this driver update. Furthermore, the several hundred games that support EAX 3 or EAX 4 for delivering in-game effects will not provide those effects from Asus sound cards.
Click to expand...
So if I'm reading this correctly, Asus definitely didn't license EAX 3+ support, nor does it sound like it really supports them. They're faking EAX 5 compatibility to get games to render more voices (presumably 128) when they're basing such actions on the EAX level offered, but none of the other EAX 3+ features have been added.

If that's the case then it's definitely something dirty on Asus's part, since it's lying to your customers to claim to support EAX 3+ when you do not. Then again this info came from Creative, so I'd be on seeing CL and Asus to fire some salvos back and forth a couple of times. The truth may be somewhere in the middle.
 
Virge

Asus only has a 'license' for EAX 2.0 if I got this right. For EAX 3-5 they use a software wrapper that catch direct sound calls and farward them to the xonar. This costs CPU time, but with quad core soon being the standard - so what?.

This is 'basically' the same thing the Alchemy wrapper does in Vista. Asus just do it on Windows XP too 🙂

My experiance so far is very good with the new Xonar DX PCIe. A few issues with the driver that I am sure they will work out soon.
 
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