Windows 10/11 has hardware-accelerated audio, but someone would have to write new drivers to get that working with the Creative hardware.

SansPlomb95 wrote on 2025-03-26, 19:46:

The X-Fi Titanium HD is also not even officially supported on Windows XP but I have been able to have it working thanks to a third party driver so you can do the same once you'll start eventually building a true Windows XP machine.
If you run hardware accelerated EAX games through anything else than Windows XP you'll have to deal with an emulation layer as stated by Creative themselves making the whole relevance of plugging an EMU20K sound card questionable.

It is convenient that software emulation exists since it's always better than nothing working at all especially since hardware accelerated EAX was not used on that many titles, however the quality of that emulation compared to the real deal still remains a point of debates up to these days across various forums.

But Creative's Alchemy does not use this emulated Directsound audio path at all. OpenAL is hardware accelerated with Audigy/X-Fi even on Vista+ since it completely bypasses Directsound.
Alchemy is a Directsound -> OpenAL wrapper. No emulation is involved.
https://support.creative.com/kb/ShowArticle.aspx?sid=28967&c

RetroGamer4Ever wrote on 2025-03-26, 20:06:

Windows 10/11 has hardware-accelerated audio, but someone would have to write new drivers to get that working with the Creative hardware.

WASAPI based audio hardware acceleration on Windows 10/11 has completely different purpose. Namely to reduce power consumption mainly on battery powered devices. Even on supported hardware it results in worse latency. And of course it has nothing to do with hardware assisted positional 3d audio or EAX like effects.

https://github.com/MicrosoftEdge/MSEdgeExplai … ad/explainer.md

So if someone could write a driver for Creative cards that supported Windows 10/11 hardware assisted audio ( IAudioClient2 ) then you would only get somewhat less CPU usage, nothing more.

RetroGamer4Ever wrote on 2025-03-26, 19:30:

If we could connect the current software emulation with the audio hardware on currently used GPUs, we could easily best Creative's last-gen EAX hardware and get exceptional audio quality. Unfortunately, nobody seems to be looking into that.

I agree. All GPUs have audio capabilities for DP/HDMI signals. AMD has TrueAudio, but I haven't heard of anything leveraging it. Nvidia keeps teasing hardware raytraced audio, but I don't know if it's a thing yet.

Sony has Tempest 3D on the PlayStation 5, but any efforts to utilize this in games must not carry over to anything on PC. Dolby Atmos maybe, that's about it. No hardware-based solutions.

Falcosoft wrote on 2025-03-26, 20:26:

RetroGamer4Ever wrote on 2025-03-26, 20:06:

Windows 10/11 has hardware-accelerated audio, but someone would have to write new drivers to get that working with the Creative hardware.

So if someone could write a driver for Creative cards that supported Windows 10/11 hardware assisted audio ( IAudioClient2 ) then you would only get somewhat less CPU usage, nothing more.

Not much point when even entry-level CPUs have at least 12 threads these days. I like the idea of utilizing GPUs for audio since they are literally sound cards, but I guess most devs aren't interested.

SansPlomb95 wrote on 2025-03-26, 19:46:

The X-Fi Titanium HD is also not even officially supported on Windows XP but I have been able to have it working thanks to a third party driver so you can do the same once you'll start eventually building a true Windows XP machine.
If you run hardware accelerated EAX games through anything else than Windows XP you'll have to deal with an emulation layer as stated by Creative themselves making the whole relevance of plugging an EMU20K sound card questionable.

It is convenient that software emulation exists since it's always better than nothing working at all especially since hardware accelerated EAX was not used on that many titles, however the quality of that emulation compared to the real deal still remains a point of debates up to these days across various forums.

Again, it's not emulation. It is a hardware-based solution. It works natively with OpenAL games, and uses a translation layer for DS3D games. The ingame settings in these games will even recognize that you have an X-Fi card and enable EAX options by default. This doesn't even happen with my Sound Blaster ZxR, which has official support for EAX. You have to force it, which I recently tested myself to confirm a worse experience. THAT is emulation. Using a Ti HD on Win 11 is not. That said, maybe the solution to this really is emulation, but it needs to be better than what Creative offers.

DeadOfKnight wrote on 2025-03-27, 01:28:

Again, it's not emulation. It is a hardware-based solution. It works natively with OpenAL games, and uses a translation layer for DS3D games. The ingame settings in these games will even recognize that you have an X-Fi card and enable EAX options by default. This doesn't even happen with my Sound Blaster ZxR, which has official support for EAX. You have to force it, which I recently tested myself to confirm a worse experience. THAT is emulation. Using a Ti HD on Win 11 is not. That said, maybe the solution to this really is emulation, but it needs to be better than what Creative offers.

DS3D games are apparently not that well translated through that OpenAL wrapper given the amount of topics complaining from various issues and inaccuracies encountered ingame.
Asus also used a trick to fake/force hardware accelerated EAX compliance on their sound cards while not even having these sound effects ultimately working while ingame.

Now for the case of games natively using an OpenAL renderer, if that theory is right we should not hear a single difference between the game running on XP and any other OS and we would not even need ALchemy but I have not tested it myself.

SansPlomb95 wrote on 2025-03-27, 03:19:

DS3D games are apparently not that well translated through that OpenAL wrapper given the amount of topics complaining from vario […]
Show full quote

DeadOfKnight wrote on 2025-03-27, 01:28:

Again, it's not emulation. It is a hardware-based solution. It works natively with OpenAL games, and uses a translation layer for DS3D games. The ingame settings in these games will even recognize that you have an X-Fi card and enable EAX options by default. This doesn't even happen with my Sound Blaster ZxR, which has official support for EAX. You have to force it, which I recently tested myself to confirm a worse experience. THAT is emulation. Using a Ti HD on Win 11 is not. That said, maybe the solution to this really is emulation, but it needs to be better than what Creative offers.

DS3D games are apparently not that well translated through that OpenAL wrapper given the amount of topics complaining from various issues and inaccuracies encountered ingame.
Asus also used a trick to fake/force hardware accelerated EAX compliance on their sound cards while not even having these sound effects ultimately working while ingame.

Now for the case of games natively using an OpenAL renderer, if that theory is right we should not hear a single difference between the game running on XP and any other OS and we would not even need ALchemy but I have not tested it myself.

Well there's several issues I think contribute to the idea that it doesn't work. To start with, Creative used to sell a software-based solution for motherboard audio that was objectively bad compared to the real deal. There are hacked and 3rd party solutions that are meant to do the same thing and likely suffer similar shortcomings. In my limited time going back and forth between my Titanium HD and ZxR with headphones, I feel like CMSS-3D is amazing in combination with EAX in games almost like it was perfectly tuned for this use case, but it kinda sounds like garbage for anything else. The opposite is true for SBX surround. It's not bad for opening up the space in movies and music, but it kinda sucks in games IMO. Also, not all games utilizing EAX do so equally, or even in all parts of the same game. There are times where I'm really not sold on whatever EAX is doing, but I'm not so sure it's because it's not being accurately reproduced, it just doesn't always hit that well.

Why argue if you can just check?
If the application transmits 5.1 audio sources (i.e. mixed audio stream), then there will be 127-6=121 buffers

If each source is transmitted, then in a rich game there will be 20-30 of them.
And the number of free hardware buffers will be significantly less.
Of course, AIDA64 must be open in parallel with the game.

Looks like it's working then on Windows 11. This is running Prey with Ti HD.

DeadOfKnight wrote on 2025-03-27, 06:31:

Looks like it's working then on Windows 11. This is running Prey with Ti HD.

Thanks for confirming.
I was looking for an old game that would run in windowed mode.
Because when you minimize it, the sound stops and the buffers are freed.
It's better to do this on a second monitor.

The ALchemy FAQ page is still up on Creative's website. It describes ALchemy as a wrapper which translates DirectSound3D to OpenAL calls.

If you have an Audigy or X-Fi card with hardware EAX support, then its hardware will be used for EAX processing. However, if you have a sound card without hardware EAX support (e.g. X-Fi Xtreme Audio) then some sort of emulation (by Creative) will be used instead. Supposedly, the latter might not sound as good as the real thing, but I haven't tested this personally. The last Creative card with hardware EAX support was the X-Fi Titanium HD. Everything made after that uses a software solution for EAX.

P.S.

As stated in Creative's FAQ, you don't need ALchemy for games which use OpenAL. They will work fine on Windows Vista/7/8/10/11 etc.

DeadOfKnight wrote on 2025-03-27, 01:01:

RetroGamer4Ever wrote on 2025-03-26, 19:30:

If we could connect the current software emulation with the audio hardware on currently used GPUs, we could easily best Creative's last-gen EAX hardware and get exceptional audio quality. Unfortunately, nobody seems to be looking into that.

I agree. All GPUs have audio capabilities for DP/HDMI signals. AMD has TrueAudio, but I haven't heard of anything leveraging it. Nvidia keeps teasing hardware raytraced audio, but I don't know if it's a thing yet.

Sony has Tempest 3D on the PlayStation 5, but any efforts to utilize this in games must not carry over to anything on PC. Dolby Atmos maybe, that's about it. No hardware-based solutions.

It's there, works, and companies are tinkering with it, but it's all tied to VR headsets and those just haven't taken off and likely never will. As the saying goes, they don't really see that the juice (3D Audio) would be worth the squeeze (sound design and mixing and all that), when the consumers are happy with using concentrate mix (headphones playing stereo audio with blah 2d/3D audio mixing) for their needs. That being said, you could use the GPU audio hardware to do the EAX work, pipe it out over digital connections to the monitor, then get the audio back through the headphone/speaker jack on the monitor.

What's all this emulation talk as if what Creative made was some magic? From what I see, it's just digital signal processing locked behind brand name "Creative" and DirectSound / OpenAL Creative-specific extension interfaces. It's what OpenAL Soft is doing, minus the artificial restrictions.

Other than that, sounds cards don't seem all that interesting, the only important thing for playback is the DAC, assuming one uses analog audio.

Even when those X-Fi Titaniums were new, there wasn't any meaningful performance impact in games. So "hardware accelerated sound" was already a gimmick at that point. At least that's the impression I got from seeing some benchmarks from the time.

Hi there, does anyone still have EAX SDK files for developers? Looking for EAX 3/4/5 SDK.

UCyborg wrote on 2025-03-27, 11:18:

What's all this emulation talk as if what Creative made was some magic? From what I see, it's just digital signal processing locked behind brand name "Creative" and DirectSound / OpenAL Creative-specific extension interfaces. It's what OpenAL Soft is doing, minus the artificial restrictions.

Other than that, sounds cards don't seem all that interesting, the only important thing for playback is the DAC, assuming one uses analog audio.

Even when those X-Fi Titaniums were new, there wasn't any meaningful performance impact in games. So "hardware accelerated sound" was already a gimmick at that point. At least that's the impression I got from seeing some benchmarks from the time.

It's not about performance impact, it's (supposedly) about sound quality. TBH, even I'm going off of memory for the two, since I don't have two PCs side by side for comparison.

I also can't say for sure that hardware-accelerated EAX sounds better because I changed other variables. One was tested using SBX Surround, and the other using CMSS-3D.

shevalier wrote on 2025-03-27, 07:14:

Thanks for confirming. I was looking for an old game that would run in windowed mode. Because when you minimize it, the sound st […]
Show full quote

DeadOfKnight wrote on 2025-03-27, 06:31:

Looks like it's working then on Windows 11. This is running Prey with Ti HD.

Thanks for confirming.
I was looking for an old game that would run in windowed mode.
Because when you minimize it, the sound stops and the buffers are freed.
It's better to do this on a second monitor.

I did it across two monitors, but not windowed. AIDA64 was not updating in real time. I alt-tabbed to it and quickly hit refresh and got the screenshot.

DeadOfKnight wrote on 2025-03-27, 14:42:

AIDA64 was not updating in real time.

Most likely, they poll free buffers and think that this is their maximum number.
Disadvantages of the algorithm.
However, as well as the names.
This is not a Hardware buffer, this is a Free Hardware buffer.

UCyborg wrote on 2025-03-27, 11:18:

Even when those X-Fi Titaniums were new, there wasn't any meaningful performance impact in games.

Actually, the X-Fi is a slightly improved Soundblaster from 1998.
There was no point in releasing it.

Wiki
The series was launched in August 2005 as a lineup of PCI sound cards, which served as the introduction for their X-Fi audio processing chip,
Development of Windows Vista began in 2001 under the codename "Longhorn"
Microsoft Windows. It was released to manufacturing on November 8, 2006,

I don't think Creative seriously expected Microsoft to cancel Vista. 😀

But in 1998, no Athlon/Pentium could handle 32 audio streams simultaneously.
E-MU created a great chip.
And Creative lost everything

UCyborg wrote on 2025-03-27, 11:18:

From what I see, it's just digital signal processing locked behind brand name "Creative" and DirectSound / OpenAL Creative-specific extension interfaces. It's what OpenAL Soft is doing, minus the artificial restrictions.
Other than that, sounds cards don't seem all that interesting, the only important thing for playback is the DAC, assuming one uses analog audio.

This " just digital processing " is fairly complex since DOSAL and OpenAL-Soft has still not been able to accurately replicate DirectSound properly in software before even talking about the EAX extension.

Even when those X-Fi Titaniums were new, there wasn't any meaningful performance impact in games. So "hardware accelerated sound" was already a gimmick at that point. At least that's the impression I got from seeing some benchmarks from the time.

John Carmack also despised Creative during the Titanium era, I can't find the right source but he also claimed to have a similar in house solution for most of what EAX was doing so that explains why it was stripped away in the BFG edition past the Creative deal.
Now let's compare Doom 3 EAX agains Doom 3 BFG if his gripes were that much legitimate. From my subjective point of view, I think BFG sounds poor.
One thing I noticed was how the shotgun sound in the original Doom 3 was surely made to only sound right through hardware accelerated EAX given how it has been replaced by a much different sound in the BFG edition.

ott wrote on 2025-03-27, 13:59:

Hi there, does anyone still have EAX SDK files for developers? Looking for EAX 3/4/5 SDK.

I think the last one was called ISACT but I could be wrong