20 years since 2004. The greatest step forward in PC gaming?

[Uriel]

Just thinking back to 2004 releases. Half Life 2, Far Cry, Rome: Total War, World of Warcraft, Counter Strike: Source, Doom 3 and my personal favourite Vampire The Masquerade: Bloodlines (although released in a dreadful state before patching).

Huge leaps forward that year - some of those still stand up pretty well now.

Has there been a bigger step forward in a year in PC gaming? Makes me feel old that it was 20 years ago...

 

[Uriel]

As for sound, recent software sound in games has just about got us back to what an XFi with macrofx and elevation filter was capable of in terms of 3d audio back in 2005, before Microsoft killed of Directsound3d with the introduction of Windows Vista.

A properly set up X-Fi using headphones or quadrophonic speakers in Windows XP could produce positional sound on par with what Dolby Atmos and DTS:X have only just started to give us back now. It was 3d, object based and included convincing elevation effects. Of course that came from tech Creative acquired from Aureal and was also present in their older soundcards.

Ironically if you ran an X-fi in 5.1 or 7.1 (which many did) it disabled object based sound with elevation effects.