Kensuke_Aida wrote:

Do you know offhand the difference between the different audio renderers? Does OpenAL make that much of a difference?

It saves me from having to use ALchemy on post-Vista versions of Windows to get hardware sound acceleration back, which is really important when ALchemy itself can be a bit quirky as a wrapper, and on top of that, it appears to allow me to use the full 128 audio channels of my X-Fi card as opposed to just 16.

It also means you can use stuff like Rapture3D and OpenAL Soft to get proper binaural audio mixing over headphones if you don't have an X-Fi and CMSS-3D Headphone, at least in theory. Haven't messed around with those that much since I don't feel the need.

I found out that there's an OpenAL renderer for Deus Ex in the works now, but it's currently incomplete. The main hangup is that the speech is stored in MP3 format, and that's not exactly royalty-free to decode. Still, at least the effort's being made.

The stock Galaxy audio engine has a flaky DirectSound3D implementation so things can't really get worse. I've used OpenAL and FMOD and they seemed fine.