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Administrator
Group: Administrators
Last Login: 11/11/2008 9:24:04 PM
Posts: 2,103, Visits: 2,251 |
| Major Audio Changes
Vista will have completely new audio plumbing, from low-level stuff to the high-level user interface stuff. One of the biggest changes is the fact that the vast majority of the audio stack runs in User Mode, not Kernel Mode. You should be able to update audio drivers without rebooting your machine, and failed audio won't cause a BSOD—it probably won't even crash your applications. The worst that should happen, in theory, is that the audio stack has to be restarted, which can happen in real-time without a reboot.
How about some built-in speech recognition? That's right, Vista will include a built-in speech recognition engine, and new and improved speech synthesis. Assuming it works as well as it should, you'll be able to dictate emails or give voice commands for web navigations without buying additional speech recognition software.
Better audio fidelity? Check. Moving primarily to User Mode actually resulted in an increase in performance over the existing Kernel Mode audio stack, because there were far fewer transitions between User Mode applications and processes and Kernel Mode drivers. Microsoft spent some of that gained performance to improve audio fidelity, primarily by transitioning the audio stack from being based on 16-bit integer operations to 32-bit floating point.
Tired of listening to some music or playing a game, and having that instant-messaging sound blast out your ears because it's five times louder than your other sounds? Vista will have per-application volume control. Problem solved.
The new audio control panel includes volume level meters, greatly improves usability, and gets rid of the old paradigm of users adjusting individual audio drivers and devices (like sound cards) and instead gives you control of intuitive audio "end points" like microphones, speakers, or headphones. The idea is to hide all those sliders that normal users can't relate to their actual sound, and give them direct control over what they hear or what they're recording.
It's a bit unfortunate, but Vista's audio stack is not hardware accelerated. Of course, neither is Windows XP's by default, but when you add hardware like an Audigy 2 or X-Fi sound card (that has a DSP) and the requisite drivers, you basically hardware-accelerate Windows XP's audio. Vista doesn't really work this way, and though the software audio is dramatically improved, you can't just accelerate it by adding a sound card with hardware acceleration. Truthfully, this is primarily a concern of games, which we hope won't be affected much. The only company making mass-market audio cards with hardware acceleration is Creative, and they're doing a good job of promoting OpenAL as the audio standard for games. OpenAL drivers under Vista should allow for hardware acceleration of 3D audio every bit as good as the latest DirectX + EAX.
AMD64 X2 5200+ 2.60GHz | 3GB DDR 667 | RAID 0 SATA3.0 WD Caviars 320GB total | Foxconn MCP61VM2MA-RS2H Geforce 6100 nforce400 chipset | Vista Ultimate x86
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Group: Forum Members
Last Login: 6/5/2007 2:59:02 PM
Posts: 1, Visits: 3 |
| | I was under the impression that the Open/AL drivers routed all the EAX information through the systems CPU using software algorithms not hardware. Meaning that in Vista, any game that allows for multi channel sounds, will dramaticaly decrease the performance of the game, due to HAL being scrapped in favor of software audio, forcing all those high end audio cards with hardware DSP into low end sound quality such as on the AC97 on board sound.
Asus M2N32 SLI Deluxe
AMD socket AM2 X2 4600
2 x Corsair XMS2 1 GB 4-4-4-12
BFG Geforce 7900GT OC
SB X-Fi Xtreme Music
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| | | | Vista Goddess
Group: Forum Members
Last Login: 12/14/2007 12:06:19 PM
Posts: 607, Visits: 842 |
| | That's not what I have understood about anything to do with Vista, it's a higher end system then any previously made and I cannot see why harwdware abstraction layering would ever be replaced by what is basically a low end soft emulator, the HAL for direct sound and acceleration was removed but only due to the vastly different way that DX10 API's handle stuff, EAX has therefore been largely superceded by Open AL2 which to most listeners will give the same results but with less interference from the EAX engine which has only ever been 'flaky' at best, a 24 channel hard audio chip is the recommended audio layer for Vista and I believe the problems some people have are due more to the as yet still Beta drivers from the likes of Creative which for instance miss all the sound FX from the game Alpha Prime, the makers are blaming Vista's generically poor sound API for this when really it's just bad code, it's not Vista that's not up to it, it's the game itself which cannot handle Open AL well if at all,in the state it's in without a patch to fix that problem is basically being sold unlawfully in most countries as it cannot work with Vista whilst stating on the package that it's supported. If you've got an Xfi you can use Alchemy to manually patch the game directory files to produce EAX sounds properly (albeit emulated by slipping a DX sound .dll into the mix) but not for any other Creative card, I can verify however that a Realtek 97 series codec chip can play all the sounds fine. I install and run very many games on Vista with anything other than complete satisfaction as the result, sure some need a little 'tweak' here and there but the ones having major problems are usually from 'unproven' studios without a track record who have failed to take anything above XP into account when coding and then will naturally blame anyone other than themselves, it's the way of the world.
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