[geeks] Best Vista story I've seen

[Charles Shannon Hendrix]

On Tue, 20 Feb 2007 08:21:04 -0500
Lionel Peterson <lionel4287 at verizon.net> wrote:

> On Mon, 2007-02-19 at 21:11, Joshua Boyd wrote:
> > On Mon, Feb 19, 2007 at 08:52:07PM -0500, Charles Shannon Hendrix wrote:
> > 
> > > I also heard that a lot of Vista sound drivers are unaccelerated, which
> > > seems to jive with previous Microsoft statements about not supporting
> > > accelerated sound hardware.
> > 
> > Interestingly, DirectSound3D support is dropped.  Also dropped is
> > hardware mixing for DirectSound.  However, OpenAL drivers can still
> > accellerate whatever they want to, so games that chose to use OpenAL (a
> > cross platform standard, prefered by Apple and supported on Linux) will
> > still get accelerated sound.  
> 
> Maybe I'm just being dense, but what, exactly is an accelerated sound
> driver?

The same thing as an accelerated graphics driver: it uses hardware to
accelerate its features.  Originally most sound cards only accelerated mixing
and multi-channel decoding.  But these days, they do a whole lot more.

For one thing, modern sound cards can create sound in a 3D space just like
light sources in a 3D graphics space.  Since in the real world, walls
blocklight just like they block sound, sound APIs need to be able to support
things like occlusion, filtering, and so on.  Doing those on the CPU is
expensive, so the more you can put off on the sound card, the faster your
system runs.

But even standard music sound processing is accelerated quite a bit, so a
good driver is essential.



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