Xear 3d Ds3d Eax Drivers For Mac
This is the best place to talk about this. I personally will never forget MS from completely ditching the 3D hardware accelerated sound from Vista. As an old PC game player, I have nostalgia for games like Unreal or Thief series, or even the first FEAR, where the 3D sound was a very important part of the game, more than today physics crap. 90% of the games today don't even have any sound options except the volumes, and this is really really sad.
The programmers are not even bothering anymore with the sound in games, so even if the OpenAL standard provides some sound acceleration, the implementations are minimal at best, and even now I cannot think of any recent game that uses OpenAL instead of shitty flat DirectX Sound. So why bother buying expensive cards supporting EAX, OpenAL, 3D SoundBack, Xear3D EX, etc, if the quality in games is on the same level with integrated sound.
But that's not the problem. The problem is WHY! WHY din the stupid retards from ms ditch all the support for 3D Sound and Hardware Accelerated sound in games?!? For the youngsters that don't have a clue of what I'm talking about, I recommend them this interesting article. You should read it all tho, so you would understand exactly what I was talking about. System Name Thought I'd be done with this by now Processor i7 4790K 4.4GHZ turbo currently at 4.6GHZ at 1.16v Motherboard MSI Z97-G55 SLI Cooling Scythe Mugen 2 rev B (SCMG-2100), stock on gpu's. Memory 8GB G.SKILL Ripjaws Z Series DDR3 2400MHZ 10-12-12-31 Video Card(s) EVGA GTX 760 Superclocked replaced HIS R9 290 that was artifacting Storage 1TB MX300 M.2 OS + Games, 4x ST31000524NS in Raid 10 Storage and Backup, external 2tb backup, Display(s) BenQ GW2255 surprisingly good screen for the price.
Case Raidmax Scorpio 668 Audio Device(s) onboard HD Power Supply EVGA 750 GQ Software Windows 10 Benchmark Scores no one cares anymore lols. System Name Zen2600 Processor Ryzen 2600 Motherboard Gigabyte AB350M-D3V Cooling CM Hyper 612S (Modified to fit AM4) Memory 8 GB Crucial Elite 3000 @3200MHz 18-18-18-36-59 DDR4 Video Card(s) MSI R9 380 Gaming 4G @1120/1450MHz Storage Crucial M550 256GB+WD Black 1TB+Seagate 4TB Display(s) Samsung C27HG70 Case Phanteks Eclipse P400 Audio Device(s) Custom HP AMP + Sennheiser HD380 Power Supply Thermaltake Toughpower 850w Modular Mouse Logitech G502 Keyboard ElE Game1 Software Windows 10 Home 64-bit Benchmark Scores Cinebench 1220, Geekbench 4433 & 20080, Passmark9 4747.
3D Hardware sound and software sound is like day and night. What a shame they don't use hardware by default anymore. FEAR and Battlefield 2 would never be the same without it. I remember there was option to choose maximum sounds for game - like 32 or 64, 128. And what about OpenAL?
I've seen OpenAL dll's in games, but those games still don't sound as good as 3D hardware accelerated sound. But there is potential to make good sound with OpenAL, no?
I'm a little bit confused with all that sound API changes. System Name E-Machine ET1831-07 Processor Pentium Dual Core E5400 @2.70 GHz Motherboard ECS -MCP73VT-PM Cooling Case Fans:120mm,92mm,2 X 60mm Other Fans: HDD cooler,PCI Cooler Memory Kingston 2 X 2GB PC2-6400 400Mhz RAM Video Card(s) NVIDIA GForce 9800GT PCIe 512 meg w/ZALMAN VF900 Fan Storage WD 1TB SATA;USB HDD's:WD MyBook 1TB Mirror,WD 2TB Elite,Hitachi 2TB Display(s) MultiSync E1100+ 20' Wide CRT Audio Device(s) XFI Extreme Music sound card with I/O Bay Power Supply Coolmaster 460 Watt PSU Software Win 7 Pro. This post is MOSTLY about EAX, but its related. For many years the only way to get hardware accelerated sound was with EAX, and this goes into the flaws of EAX and why it fell down - and why we shouldnt miss it. EAX was proprietary. You cant get EAX above 2.0 without being creative.
Many games that used EAX, disabled software driven features in the sound if you had no EAX. That means no 5.1 sound (remember all that crap about vista breaking surround sound in games?
No EAX, 2.0 sound for you) 3. Anything done in hardware with audio, can be done in software. You can find cracked/pirated versions of creatives alchemy on the web, which enable at least upto EAX 4.0 on any card via software. While some of you are halfway there with the comments about quality, that comes down to the DPS's in the soundcard. The only 'changes' EAX would make in these cases are no different to equalizers and reverb effects. And if you need an EQ to make your sound card sound good, then its quality isn't that great.
Tweak the EQ yourself. And as for 3D sound. Well i dont know about you guys, but when i play games (modern and old) with headphones and no EAX, the 3D sound is still present.
Its easy to tell if a gunshot came from in front or behind you, and not just to the sides. I dont really understand the hangup on EAX - i've got an audigy 4 here, and i compared it to my auzen and my realteks. The sound quality varied between them (based on the DSP's), but EAX didnt make any difference other than enabling features in games that disabled them. THOSE games sound worse without it, because the audio was crippled without it.
Games designed without EAX, dont have those problems. The real reason for many games having flat audio is the same reason they have crap textures, FPS caps, tiny levels and crap AI - they're console ports. The death of EAX and creatives hardware accelerated sound have nothing to do with the lack of quality in many modern titles. Yes, I agree with Mussels, I still get 3D sound in my games from both my speakers or headphones, dunno what the difference might be when using an integrated sound processor though, ever since my first Sound Blaster 16 for my old 486DX I've always used a discrete sound card, so perhaps I havent suffered from lack of 3D sound, I may be wrong though. I remember when Vista came out and MS ditched hardware sound accel.
Creative released their alchemy drivers to still have hardware access to direct sound in old game titles. You guys need to play Thief or FEAR, to fully understand what 3D sound is all about. I'm not talking about hearing sound from behind or left/right side, I'm talking about REAL 3D sound. Sound that changes it's pitch when you are in sewers, rooms, hallways, etc, sound that reflect on metallic floors, walls, sounds that even with a 4.1 solution you can hear them coming from above, bellow, or through the corner, this is what I'm talking about. I posted a link there, feel free to fully read it.
And it's not only about EAX doing this. The first one was Aureal 3D that even today is considered THE BEST technology ever developed for real 3D sound, and it's matched only by EAX 5.0. We also had Sensaura 3D, and the latest which is used today(is it anymore??), OpenAL. It is now hosted (and largely developed) by Creative Technology with on-going support from Apple, Blue Ripple Sound, and free software/open source enthusiasts. While the OpenAL charter says that there will be an 'Architecture Review Board' (ARB) modeled on the OpenGL ARB, no such organization has ever been formed and the OpenAL specification is generally handled and discussed via email on its public mailing list.
Since 1.1, the implementation by Creative has turned proprietary, with the last releases in free licenses still accessible through the project's subversion. However, OpenAL Soft is a widespread Open Source alternative. Anyone that has played Doom 3 Ressurection of evil on X-Fi soundcard with HW enabled EAX 5.0 sound is just breathtaking. Those hallways in dig site, probably the most atmospheric sound sensation i've ever experienced and i'm a total nut on the sound in games. Audio processing is certainly not all that 'free' even on todays 6 core CPU's. When you enable 128 sounds and each of them gets processed by reverberation, occlusion or other form of processing, the framerate skydives down to the ground. The difference is noticeable even on X-Fi powered soundcard with Core i7 920 @ 3,3GHz so i'm pretty sure it will be huge on just CPU alone.
And with software solutions i always get the feeling that some form of optimization kicks in cutting 'unneeded' sounds and their processing to conseerve the CPU. Or they simply don't care about sound, that's why it sounds like crap.
And it's not only about EAX doing this. The first one was Aureal 3D that even today is considered THE BEST technology ever developed for real 3D sound, and it's matched only by EAX 5.0. We also had Sensaura 3D, and the latest which is used today(is it anymore??), OpenAL The thing is, OpenAL hasn't been updated since 2009, making me thing the 3D sound on PC is DEAD. Still now I haven't got a clue why Direct Sound 3D was ditched from MS. They could have turn it into an EAX/OpenAL killer, just like Direct3D 11 had become. I can cover all that as one: because it already was dead.
Creative had killed the market completely with a stagnant monopoly. While i dont know what official reason they gave, the truth is that it opened the sound card market right back up again. We'd have no xonar, no auzentech, competing giving us better actual audio quality - it'd be about paying $100+ for onboard level audio, just because it supports the latest EAX standards (and i repeat: with creative, no EAX meant no hardware audio, no surround sound, no 3D effects, no reverb, nada but plain 2.0) Yes, be sad that audio aint what it once was - but lay the blame where its due, and please stop lumping so many seperate features under the one name. Hardware acclerated sound isnt the reason its gone away, its because game devs just dont want to bother these days. System Name Zen2600 Processor Ryzen 2600 Motherboard Gigabyte AB350M-D3V Cooling CM Hyper 612S (Modified to fit AM4) Memory 8 GB Crucial Elite 3000 @3200MHz 18-18-18-36-59 DDR4 Video Card(s) MSI R9 380 Gaming 4G @1120/1450MHz Storage Crucial M550 256GB+WD Black 1TB+Seagate 4TB Display(s) Samsung C27HG70 Case Phanteks Eclipse P400 Audio Device(s) Custom HP AMP + Sennheiser HD380 Power Supply Thermaltake Toughpower 850w Modular Mouse Logitech G502 Keyboard ElE Game1 Software Windows 10 Home 64-bit Benchmark Scores Cinebench 1220, Geekbench 4433 & 20080, Passmark9 4747.
I can cover all that as one: because it already was dead. Creative had killed the market completely with a stagnant monopoly. While i dont know what official reason they gave, the truth is that it opened the sound card market right back up again. We'd have no xonar, no auzentech, competing giving us better actual audio quality - it'd be about paying $100+ for onboard level audio, just because it supports the latest EAX standards (and i repeat: with creative, no EAX meant no hardware audio, no surround sound, no 3D effects, no reverb, nada but plain 2.0) Yes, be sad that audio aint what it once was - but lay the blame where its due, and please stop lumping so many seperate features under the one name. Hardware acclerated sound isnt the reason its gone away, its because game devs just dont want to bother these days. I agree on lumping seperate things in one bag, so I've red about this a little bit, because I wanted to know why one old game sounds so good (only using alchemy), while EAX isn't mentioned. 3D sound many are talking about (that is ditched) is not only EAX but DirectSound3D too.
Xear 3d Sound Simulation Software
So there is 3D effects, reverb etc. With Creative while not using EAX.
So Creative isn't the only bad one here. DS3D sounds almost as good as EAX, and is not proprietary standard that only Creative owns. Yes, F.E.A.R. Sounds great and it uses EAX, but as well I can say - Listen how A.I.M.2 sounds and you'll hear that it's nearly as good(using DS3D) I think.
Xear 3d Ds3d Eax Drivers For Mac
And yes, software 3D sound can be good too, like in dirt 2 if I am not mistaken, but as others have mentioned - it does so by using CPU power.edit. It seems so that Dirt 2 can use both - hardware sound via OpenAL or optional Rapture 3D software sound. I don't think its that it died because its microsoft completely but around 2007 -2008 codecs started taking over and creative started to support codecs by allowing eax 5 and x-fi to be emulated by cpu which further gave bad PR, and they started supporting their sound cards less and less and game devs bailed on eax. Microsoft started it buy creative definitely finished it. But if you have a soundcard with good oamps and dacs they will sound better than integrated usually its not like all sound cards and integrated have the same quality now, and 3D sound is a shame because many developers still don't support it completely like it was years ago but is it worth it to a game developer to implement it when alot of games now are ports and many people aren't going to have a sound system to make it worth it.
I would like to see a comeback in the gaming sound market but I don't want creative to do it because creative tries to monopolize it too much.