Not that I'm opposed to it, but historically MS has always pushed their own propriety standards instead of using open standards. Apps written using open standards are easy to port to other operating systems, which is precisely what MS wants to avoid. There must be a business reason for this but I don't see it, unless they just didn't want to invest the money in developing Dsound anymore.
Why did MS abandon DirectSound in favor of OpenAL?
- Thread starter Sureshot324
- Start date
I don't think many people were actually developing to the DirectSound API. Creative was using the hardware virtualization layer to run EAX, but the higher level APIs didn't get much use. Mostly you see games using Miles Positional Audio or some other proprietary system. So one way to look at it is that MS got to save money on development, look a little open-sourcey for awhile, and give up very little advantage.
Microsoft didn't abandon DirectSound.
They changed how it worked so that now any hardware acceleration is impossible to use. (personally I feel that hardware acceleration for 3d sound is pretty f-ing worthless anyways. EAX is just a fluff item to sell overpriced audio cards realy. Hell Doom3 and such wouldn't even support EAX if it wasn't for the fact that Creative bullied ID into supporting it by threatening them with Software Patent lawsuites.)
Creative wants people to use OpenAL becuase using that they can by-pass Microsoft's driver model and access the hardware directly. OpenAL is the sound equivelent to OpenGL (get it? Open Audio/Graphics Library) and was originally made to make a sound API for programming games for Linux.
It's similar to how ASIO audio drivers were created by makers of professional audio applications to bypass the Windows sound API which is worthless for doing audio production work.
They changed how it worked so that now any hardware acceleration is impossible to use. (personally I feel that hardware acceleration for 3d sound is pretty f-ing worthless anyways. EAX is just a fluff item to sell overpriced audio cards realy. Hell Doom3 and such wouldn't even support EAX if it wasn't for the fact that Creative bullied ID into supporting it by threatening them with Software Patent lawsuites.)
Creative wants people to use OpenAL becuase using that they can by-pass Microsoft's driver model and access the hardware directly. OpenAL is the sound equivelent to OpenGL (get it? Open Audio/Graphics Library) and was originally made to make a sound API for programming games for Linux.
It's similar to how ASIO audio drivers were created by makers of professional audio applications to bypass the Windows sound API which is worthless for doing audio production work.
Was it merely that they no longer allow programs direct access to sound hardware and force them to go through the Windows API for it? If so, I could see some rationale for it at least.
vista removed both graphics and audio from kernal level. this was done for 2 main reasons:
1) drm
2) stability/security (drivers can't bring down the whole system)
msft still cares about graphics so they took this as opportunity to do drastic changes to graphics model and set path for future (gpu task scheduler, virtual memory) and drop older legacy directx.
so for graphics, after old model was abandoned msft stepped in with new api.
but for audio msft abandoned old model and left audio community (hardware, games) to fend for themselves. it's not that msft is supporting or pushing for an open standard, it's that the community is moving towards it since msft stopped caring.
any changes msft did make for audio is geared towards drm, htpc, and hd-dvd/blu-ray
in a year or 2 everything will be like it is now with xp, direct sound, and eax. except on vista people will be using openal and eax 7,8,9 and still be stuck with creative as only choice for surround sound in gaming (because they'll sue any alternatives).
also, hardware acceleration isn't really needed anymore. computers just need a dac
1) optimistically it might provide 10% boost, but that mattered more in the quake2/3 days when 40-50fps was high.
2) dual cores are common now. it's perfectly reasonable to do sound in software. and with quad cores becoming more mainstream this year, any hit from software audio will matter even less or not matter at all
Hardware acceleration isnt needed anymore, for sound as we know it. Which is a far cry from where audio could be right now had creative not sued every competitor into the ground. Almost 10 years later, a3d2 is still superior to eax5.
I remember playing the original half life 2 with a vortex 2 card. The sound reflections as you moved from room to room were quite impressive. EAX hasn't come close to replicating that feeling. Although there was a massive frame rate hit...on p2-300s.
Creative is just sitting on at probably another 10 years or so of sound technology that has already been developed, but hasnt been brought to market. Imagine if nvidia or Ati only brought out a new chipset every 5 years...we'd be at geforce1 levels by now, which is approximately where we're at in terms of 3d audio. In the next gen of X-fi's, maybe two gens from now, creative will unveil an astonishing new technology that allows you to customize the HRTFs to your own ear. The same technology that sensaura had...5 years ago. Mark my words.
Stewardship of OpenAL is the only reason I still have so much as a shred of respect for Creative.
Even when the patents run out on the Aureal tech (anybody know what they are?), how much of use will reach the public domain? No Aureal code, no Aureal hardware schematics, so what else is there? Is A3D effectively an unused trade secret?
Having bits and peices of speciality hardware to offload off of your main proccessor is pointless anyways.
'hardware acceleration' for the personal computing is dying. It realy is. Hardware modems, real hardware raid, accelerated sound cards, 'physix' engines, etc etc. dead dead dead.
It used to be if you needed high performance you bought the fastest proccessor you could. If you needed more then that then your choices were to go and get hardware offloading cards or to add more cpus. Adding second socket was expensive, but not _that_ much more expensive. But if you wanted more then that then it got stupid expensive and you had diminishing results so it was cheaper to start adding hardware offload.
Then, especially for RAID, you have PCI bus bandwidth limitations, so that even if you had excess cpu to burn you coulnd't realy use it. But all that is changing as now we have PCI express and the harddrives are not able to keep up with the motherboard in terms of speed so now you have excess bandwidth to burn.
But all that is changing. It's cheaper and more effective just to add more cores. The major limitations are going to be the motherboard, so your going to see more and more bits and peices of the motherboard stuck in the proccessor.
As things go on it's going to get fairly pointless to even have "hardware acceleration" for 3D graphics.
'hardware acceleration' for the personal computing is dying. It realy is. Hardware modems, real hardware raid, accelerated sound cards, 'physix' engines, etc etc. dead dead dead.
It used to be if you needed high performance you bought the fastest proccessor you could. If you needed more then that then your choices were to go and get hardware offloading cards or to add more cpus. Adding second socket was expensive, but not _that_ much more expensive. But if you wanted more then that then it got stupid expensive and you had diminishing results so it was cheaper to start adding hardware offload.
Then, especially for RAID, you have PCI bus bandwidth limitations, so that even if you had excess cpu to burn you coulnd't realy use it. But all that is changing as now we have PCI express and the harddrives are not able to keep up with the motherboard in terms of speed so now you have excess bandwidth to burn.
But all that is changing. It's cheaper and more effective just to add more cores. The major limitations are going to be the motherboard, so your going to see more and more bits and peices of the motherboard stuck in the proccessor.
As things go on it's going to get fairly pointless to even have "hardware acceleration" for 3D graphics.
I wouldn't go that far. In all likelihood what will happen is that a GPU will get added to a CPU as another core (or maybe add GPU functions into a CPU core). But regardless we'll still have frames rendered the same way, we just won't have a separate discreet chip that does it.
On-board sound has too much noise. I hate it when I can actually hear the interrupts created by my mouse. As long as they put standard PCI sockets on whatever becomes my next motherboard, I'm using my CS4630-based sound card (unless a few miracles happen, such as some of that tech Creative is sitting on comes out). But that's a problem with DAC, not software vs. hardware mixing.
No, but only on a technicality. All of the massively parallel calculation hardware that currently resides in the GPU will end up as part of the CPU or on a co-processor. Remember, some things don't parallelize in ways that are conducive to having multiple threads of execution.
Glad I don't have that problem with my onboard.
Anyways if you want good sound you'd want to use SPDIF out. And unless your using a old Audigy it's about just as nice coming and going irregardless of what card your using.
It'll be up to the programmer and compiler to determine what ends up on which core, of course. Everything will just be regular ol' C code (or whatever).
I can expect in the next 5 years you'll see the discrete 3d graphic accelerator starting to die off in consumer electronics.
postmortemIA
Diamond Member
- Jul 11, 2006
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Originally posted by: drag
Glad I don't have that problem with my onboard.
Put headphones on and try.
Haven't tried this myself yet, but I've heard people say that, if you mute the line in and mic connections that can sometimes get rid of the mouse noise.
Schadenfroh
Elite Member
- Mar 8, 2003
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I want to get 2 of them - one to send and one to receive. I'll be 2 times as fast as everyone else!
Stewardship is putting it nicely. It's more like a dictatorship. OpenAL is no more advanced than DS3D was - it still uses the proprietary EAX.
Funny thing was, when EAX and A3D were fighting for dominance, it was EAX that was the spec that was "open" for everyone to use. This went on through EAX1 and EAX2, all the while creative was suing aureal out of existence. The bitter irony is that aureal actually WON, but creative had already bankrupted them through the legal battle.
From wiki:
(Barely)
When that finally happened, they closed the system, and everything from EAX3 and up has been creative only. Which is why the most you ever see on non-creative cards is EAX2.
Back in the day, the only thing EAX had going for it was that there was little of a CPU hit. EAX2 supports a single statistical reverb layer, and obstructions/occlusions that never worked right. It was a dirty hack, and still is. It was fake 3d audio, like the original wolfenstein and doom was fake 3d graphics. Aureal fully modeled the sound reflections against surfaces, and although the tech was early and it sounded a little rough, it still sounded great. A3D 3.0 never did come out, but it had massive promise.
Most people don't care about audio because they never heard how good it could be, unless you were lucky enough to have a vortex 2 back in the day. A3D was so freakishly real at times that it gave me chills. It was on a completely different level ~7-8 years ago than EAX is now. Perhaps it could all be done on a CPU now, but the simple fact is that it isn't, and EAX is still garbage.
well i bought into the hype too. everyone told me how fantastical the audigy2zs was, and how clear and true sounding it is. yeah, right. i bought one to replace my turtle beach montego DDL and it was a big mistake. the audigy2 sounds like garbage comparatively. i cant believe people think this card is any good. im now looking into the bluegears with cmi8788 chipset, should be even better then the montego
Originally posted by: postmortemIA
Originally posted by: drag
Glad I don't have that problem with my onboard.
Put headphones on and try.
Your hilarious. You mean something like these?. Because that is what I use.
And like I said before if you want best sound then your going to use digital spdif out to a external receiver. Any sort of analog circuit inside your computer is going to be subject to lots of interference. It doesn't ultimately matter a whole lot if the peice of printed board it happens to be located on is sticking out of a PCI slot or flat on the motherboard.
Are you sure?
In Windows it requires that your using a creative card or a nforce4 card, but in Linux you can use any alsa-supported card, I beleive. I don't know a whole lot about it, but I am curious. (of course with no ahrdware acceleration, unless your using hacked versions of the libraries and a creative card)
Only in the sense of them having a stranglehold over anything but the most basic 3d audio. You'll get 3d audio cross platform, but that doesnt impress me anymore. That impressed me 10 years ago, and we've gone basically nowhere since then.
Any other company in the world can make a card that supports openAL, but still can't offer *anything* over the old DS3D and EAX2, so who cares?
I'm amazed at the amount of discussion that can come from pure speculation. Nobody on this thread has any real idea why.
It has been some interesting and intelligent discussion though!
It has been some interesting and intelligent discussion though!
They dropped ds3d for stability reasons, and moved their focus to onboard audio and multimedia. They didnt favor OpenAL, they just don't care anymore. They couldnt further develop ds3d if they wanted to without infringing on creative's patents. It could never be a money maker for them.
OK, so as I was asking before, barring a miracle, will any of the 10-year-old yet still-impressive audio tech currently stuffed up Creative's ass ever see the light of day? The patents will expire eventually, but I'm guessing that there's more to the story than just those.
I looked up the Areal stuff.
The special thing they made was 'Wavetracing' wasn't it? So like 'Raytracing' your following the path of the audio sound.
I don't see any reason why you can't program that stuff as a extension to OpenAL. There is probably a way to do it that doesn't infringe on the patents, more then one way to skin the cat and such.
They'll happily take any patches you guys make, or convinse people to make or something like that.
OpenAL already supports everything that EAX and such can do, but with software rendering.
The special thing they made was 'Wavetracing' wasn't it? So like 'Raytracing' your following the path of the audio sound.
I don't see any reason why you can't program that stuff as a extension to OpenAL. There is probably a way to do it that doesn't infringe on the patents, more then one way to skin the cat and such.
They'll happily take any patches you guys make, or convinse people to make or something like that.
OpenAL already supports everything that EAX and such can do, but with software rendering.
1prophet
Diamond Member
- Aug 17, 2005
- 5,313
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Microsoft's reason according to Creative .
Creative's workaround for X-fi cards to restore Direct Sound hardware acceleration called Alchemy
Reasons for Change
Microsoft had stated reasons for these kinds of radical changes that go beyond ?the need to change things?. Reasons include moving as much software out of kernel mode as possible thereby minimizing bug checks (in layman?s terms ?BSODs?), developing an architecture to make debugging audio problems in applications easier, and supporting a whole new generation of Digital Rights Management
Creative's workaround for X-fi cards to restore Direct Sound hardware acceleration called Alchemy
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