First post, by thecrankyhermit
Replaying Deus Ex in Windows 7 led me down this train of thought. I am using an onboard Realtek ALC888 chipset, and have 5.1 speakers connected via three analog stereo jacks. Presently, I can not get surround sound to work in Deus Ex. Virtually everything I have done only leads to the front left and right speakers doing anything. And even then, the stereo channel separation seems weak - I'm not even sure if it's doing anything at all.
I've tried ALchemy and ALchemy Universal, and they did nothing. I tried Realtek 3D Soundback, which did nothing (I had to launch it in compatibility mode - it did dump some dlls in the Deus Ex directory including a dummy DSOUND.dll, but this had no apparent effect on the sound). I tried this thing called "IndirectSound," which sort of works, but it seems buggy and incomplete; positional audio from objects in the environment work pretty well, but gunshots from my own hand come from behind me, and the docs say that EAX effects like reverb aren't implemented at all.
I haven't had Windows 7 very long, but I have heard that even some relatively recent games don't behave well with surround sound, like Half-Life 2.
I think I may have exhausted freely available solutions, and I am looking into ones that involve money. I stumbled upon this thing called "Sound Blaster X-Fi MB3" which looks promising. If I understand it right, it would emulate EAX and DirectSound through software, and output on my onboard. Is this basically it, and would it work for my purposes?
Or, what about buying an actual card? Any reason this would be preferable to the software (other than freeing up the CPU - I am assuming my dual core is more than enough to handle EAX emulation and Deus Ex at the same time), and if so, what card would be best for these gaming purposes?
Running:
Windows 10
Core i5-6600
Geforce GTX 970
8GB RAM