Re: Is a Creative sound card required to use OpenAL?
Jason Daly <[email protected]>
| Newsgroups | gmane.comp.lib.openal |
|---|---|
| Message-ID | <[email protected]> |
On 02/22/2011 02:01 PM, Phillip Pi wrote: > > I'd like to know too. Hardware EAX support for gaming too or is that > irrevelant these days with newer games and Windows? Also, Linux > compatible. Creative cards that use the EMU10K2 chipset (most, but not all of the so-called "X-Fi" cards) have a native implementation of OpenAL that goes straight to hardware for effects and mixing. Games that use OpenAL directly can get hardware acceleration on this hardware. Also older games that used DirectSound3D under XP and earlier can be accelerated using ALchemy, which is essentially an OpenAL wrapper for the old DS3D software. I read a bit about the ASUS Xonar that Sam Brown mentioned. They advertise EAX 5 compatibility, but there seems to be a bit of controversy about that. Creative issued a statement that ASUS never licensed EAX 5 (or 3 or 4, for that matter), and that their statements about compatibility are misleading. I don't own one, so I really have no idea where the truth is. In any case, it seems like the Xonar has some kind of hardware capability with OpenAL as well, including a DS3D emulation layer for older games. As far as newer games go, there are some that continue to support OpenAL, but from my perspective, it seems like the industry as a whole has shifted to rely more on the CPU for sound rendering, especially since the multicore processors have arrived. --"J" _______________________________________________ Openal mailing list [email protected] http://opensource.creative.com/mailman/listinfo/openal