Vista have no surround sound?

Yes Vista has a new user-mode audio stack which folks like Creative are going to have to redevelop their drivers for if they intend to support more complex sound features.

The new audio stack has been there since Beta 2 which was almost a year ago IIRC, so it's not like this major change has crept up on Creative and caught them by surprise. They and the other sound card manufacturers have had a long long time to get up to speed but they chose to leave it till the 11th hour.
 
Vault5ChOnG said:
Just read it there, anyone confirm this and why on earth would they remove this. nothing sp1 wont fix but still lol :D

http://crave.cnet.co.uk/gamesgear/0,39029441,49287112,00.htm
Click to expand...

SP1 won't fix it. Vista still supports surround sound, just they removed the audio part of DX, so games will need to use OpenAL instead of DirectSound. From what I have heard most games support/use OpenAL anyway, so it shouldn't be much of a problem.
 
Yup, OpenAL is the future. Proprietary (and largely crap) extensions such as "EAX" are not.

SP1 certainly isn't going to fix any calculated design decisions made by Microsoft. The new audio stack wasn't an accident. Microsoft simply got fed up of being blamed for BSOD's when it was the sound driver's fault.
 
Surround sounds does work in Vista, as does EAX if the game uses OpenAL... BF2142, Prey, Doom3 all use OpenAL for sound support...

Creative have released a beta of their alchemy wrapper which is a software HAL, it allows older DX based games to support EAX and surround sound in Vista by coverting DX sound calls into OpenAL

http://preview.creativelabs.com/alchemy/default.aspx
 
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pallys said:
Except that Creative own OpenAL
Click to expand...
Well Creative have a hand in its development - yes. Hence EAX being obsolete. It's an open source project that oddly is actually the best at its job :)
 
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