"Microsoft's Windows team made the bold decision to rewrite the Vista audio stack from the ground up, and in doing so they removed hardware acceleration for DirectSound. That's right. They took hardware support away from the most ubiquitous sound API implemented in games over the past several years.
As a result, in many of today's games, all those feature-laden sound cards, with their multiple channels, audio extensions and hardware accelerated processors, become little better than common garden variety on-board sound running in software mode. Naturally, Creative Labs (amongst others) is pissed."
Yeah but c'mon we can't cling to legacy hardware forever, what's next? ZIP disks anyone? Anyone got a spare JAZ disk so I can backup 1/4 of my DVD+R ?
The HAL had to go, its nature's way, onward and upward. Evolution. Also Creative have their own drivers for X-Fi that circumvent DirectX 10 and remap calls to OpenAL to cater for (nasty) legacy hardware. Granted, that's a headache Creative could have done without but its not a headache for the user.
I have a Creative Audigy2 and I'm not sure it's full feature set is supported in Vista ie EAX etc - I think only X-Fi (not sure). If so, then that's just nature's way of telling me to move with the times and upgrade. Nature is a beautiful thing clearly. It's the same principle illustrated in my avatar - the evolution of british wildlife, reshaping and adapting (in this case to cigaretes). I hoped I would manage to persuade you without delving into hard scientific fact but you left me no choice.
Also you can turn off that sucky UAC, of course. You don't have to use
every Vista feature. 90% will do. UAC is for the average Mum & Dad and non-computer savvy dude that just wants to get on and write letters while the computer babysits as far as possible on security not boffins who own a GP2X.
Really, is it really lower latency than ASIO drivers? If so I will be upgrading my audio workstation
The latency is comparible, but ASIO for me breaks up for me when I'm running too many tracks and caning the CPU. This is not the case with DirectSound on Vista at the same latency values. I do a lot of orchestral pieces and I'm very impressed with the performance vs ASIO for the music I write. At present, I can only comment on my own experience with it but so far so good.
Another reason I could never go back to XP is the search/indexing service. My harddrive is a pigsty. It's untidy, files are strewn across 1Tb of disks and I can never find anything. The file search on Vista is very accessible and simple to use and accepts natural language searches, so I can get it to show me all the mp3's I made in the last 5 days marked with a certain genre etc. Not the most revolutionary feature I admit, nor is it the fabled WinFS, but its damn useful!
Curious fact of the day: If you type cigaretes (spell it correctly not like me) the board will mysteriously automatically change it to the word 'moron'. How delightful!
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