Sound Blaster recently announced some new sound cards. In the process of reading about them, I saw a few posts that Windows 8 will be returning to allowing the use of hardware-assisted audio (please forgive my lack of technical terms here).
What I remember (as a user) was that sound was previously improved by add-on cards years ago, then with Windows 7, no hardware calls were allowed for sound, so all processing was done by the CPU. It seemed to me that games eventually no longer attempted to use EAX or other special sound effects.
With this aforementioned change in Windows 8, will there be a return to improvements in audio effects for games? Will it affect Windows in any other noticeable way? And can anyone point me to any info or articles about that change? I haven't read anything detailing that change to Windows 8.
What I remember (as a user) was that sound was previously improved by add-on cards years ago, then with Windows 7, no hardware calls were allowed for sound, so all processing was done by the CPU. It seemed to me that games eventually no longer attempted to use EAX or other special sound effects.
With this aforementioned change in Windows 8, will there be a return to improvements in audio effects for games? Will it affect Windows in any other noticeable way? And can anyone point me to any info or articles about that change? I haven't read anything detailing that change to Windows 8.
