UCyborg wrote on 2025-09-28, 19:17:

May be interesting to check what saving the report in dxdiag.exe says. With up-to date DirectX on Windows XP at least, I remember it does list some details about supported EAX versions.

Does anyone know why the 3D Mark 03 60 sound test doesn't run on the RX with Alchemy? I've set the number of channels to 63. I even tried 128 but only the 24 sound test runs. Does it need an X-Fi?

[EDIT] Figured it out. On Win 11 the RX only has 57 free buffers when Windows starts up, so no 60 sound test, or at least that's what Rightmark 3D Sound test reports.

sharangad wrote on Today, 09:40:

[EDIT] Figured it out. On Win 11 the RX only has 57 free buffers when Windows starts up, so no 60 sound test, or at least that's what Rightmark 3D Sound test reports.

Are there any real-world implications to this? Or is this finding only relevant to a benchmark? Thank you.

Barley wrote on Today, 14:52:

Are there any real-world implications to this? Or is this finding only relevant to a benchmark? Thank you.

A few WinXP era games actually checked the number of hardware voices to determine which audio quality preset should be available on your sound card.

One such example would be Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter as shown in this post of mine.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on Today, 14:59:

Barley wrote on Today, 14:52:

Are there any real-world implications to this? Or is this finding only relevant to a benchmark? Thank you.

A few WinXP era games actually checked the number of hardware voices to determine which audio quality preset should be available on your sound card.

One such example would be Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter as shown in this post of mine.

I just wonder if it's because I've set the windows speaker setting to 7.1 with the rx speaker setting set to headphones. I am under the impression this is needed for surround on headphones. This used to be the case on win xp and 98.

sharangad wrote on Today, 16:02:

I just wonder if it's because I've set the windows speaker setting to 7.1 with the rx speaker setting set to headphones. I am under the impression this is needed for surround on headphones. This used to be the case on win xp and 98.

Whether that actually improves positional audio when using headphones might depend on the game.

For my (limited) understanding, if a game isn't using DirectSound3D nor OpenAL, then it can make sense to set Windows speaker settings to 7.1 while keeping the sound card in headphone mode (preferably also with CMSS turned on). But such games usually come from the Win7 era and up. For most WinXP titles, it shouldn't be necessary to do this. I've talked about that in more detail here.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on Today, 18:14:

sharangad wrote on Today, 16:02:

I just wonder if it's because I've set the windows speaker setting to 7.1 with the rx speaker setting set to headphones. I am under the impression this is needed for surround on headphones. This used to be the case on win xp and 98.

Whether that actually improves positional audio when using headphones might depend on the game.

For my (limited) understanding, if a game isn't using DirectSound3D nor OpenAL, then it can make sense to set Windows speaker settings to 7.1 while keeping the sound card in headphone mode (preferably also with CMSS turned on). But such games usually come from the Win7 era and up. For most WinXP titles, it shouldn't be necessary to do this. I've talked about that in more detail here.

I seem to remember some games using the Miles Sound System had a habit of switching the windows speaker setting to 2.0/2.1 on exit, which in turn disabled surround, because Creative mixer synced with Windows. I think there was a popular WW2 shooter around the turn of the century which did this and it was pretty annoying, can't remember what it was called. I seem to to recall Creative added the "sync with control panel" option to disable this. I had a 5.1 speaker setup at the time and had to check the setting before starting pretty much any game.

sharangad wrote on Today, 18:43:

I seem to remember some games using the Miles Sound System had a habit of switching the windows speaker setting to 2.0/2.1 on exit, which in turn disabled surround, because Creative mixer synced with Windows.

Sadly, a lot of games do that. I have 5.1 speakers, and I always double check if my settings are correct before playing anything on WinXP. And yeah, what you described does disable surround sound on my setup.

But if you're using headphones under WinXP, it should be enough to simply choose the headphone option in the Creative Console Launcher, and let it sync with Windows automatically.