Getting back to the joys of 3D Audio, NVidia dropped it from their VRWorks toolkit, so there is no longer any built-in 3D audio option for devs to use with their hardware. Instead, devs can use the 3D audio feature of whatever engine is being used for a game, which is something that the dominant Unreal Engine has or they can use third-party software, such as Valve's Steam Audio, which actually slides in quite nicely in place of DirectSound3D and EAX and Audiokinetic offers Wwise, which offers 3D audio capabilities to many games. AMD is still rolling with TrueAudio, but adoption for that is non-existent, in favor of third-party cross-platform options like the aforementioned ones, which TrueAudio currently does work with. Unfortunately, AMD has not put any dev resources into it since the COVID Pandemic, so it seems to be more or less abandoned by their corporate overlords.

I've spent the whole day messing with CMSS-3D and i'd like to hear you opinion on this. I find that most of the times it makes the games sound weird, almost like some kind of flanger effect which isn't natural and very mid focused. It almost feels like there's some clipping going on at times or sound files are played at a lower bitrate. I wonder if there's a problem with my setup or even my ears. I'm using an X-Fi Titanium under both XP and 7 x64, 2.17.0008 driver, Audio Technica ATH-M50x plugged directly in the sound card. Creative console set to game mode/headphones.

OM606 wrote on 2026-01-17, 15:47:

I've spent the whole day messing with CMSS-3D and i'd like to hear you opinion on this. I find that most of the times it makes the games sound weird, almost like some kind of flanger effect which isn't natural and very mid focused.

Creative's CMSS-3D Headphone implementation mostly aims to improve positional audio. I imagine sound clarity may suffer a bit because of that, but it might also vary from game to game. Personally, I don't have too much experience with it, as I rarely use headphones nowadays.

Potentially, EAX 5.0 games like Battlefield 2142 might handle CMSS-3D a bit better than older titles. This isn't outright stated anywhere, but it can be inferred from Creative's old audio guide pages such as this one. Try running that game if you haven't done so already, and see if there are any changes.

You shouldn't feel like there's clipping or the sound is played from lower bitrate files. You may not prefer the way a game sounds with cmss-3d enabled, but definitely not the things you described above. What is the setting for speakers/headphone that you have selected in Windows Contol Panel?

I think it really depends on the game. I'd say that for my tastes i prefer it off most of the times. I am watching youtube videos of people playing games with CMSS-3D on/off and it confirms that it changes the sound the way it does on my PCs. I think that sound definition suffers a bit in some cases and that it can be more tiring to the ear with some headphones/games. It seems like most of the characteristics i didn't like about EAX in fact come from CMSS-3D.

I wonder how differently CMSS-3D sounds and is implemented between say a 2007 X-Fi Titanium with 2010 drivers and a current generation Audigy RX with current drivers.

I own an Audigy Rx and i have to say that i really like the effect it has on games. I don't know how much difference would be between different cards or drivers, but i suspect it would not be that significant. Cmss-3d is really something that is a matter of taste, i know quite a few people that don't really like the effect. Eax on the other hand is something different and i could hardly imagine anyone disliking it. There are of course games that have poorly implemented Eax, in the sense that there are very few instances during the course of the game that there is a discernible Eax effect, but i don't think that any game sounds "worse" with Eax enabled.

RetroGamer4Ever wrote on 2026-01-17, 15:18:

Getting back to the joys of 3D Audio, NVidia dropped it from their VRWorks toolkit, so there is no longer any built-in 3D audio option for devs to use with their hardware. Instead, devs can use the 3D audio feature of whatever engine is being used for a game, which is something that the dominant Unreal Engine has or they can use third-party software, such as Valve's Steam Audio, which actually slides in quite nicely in place of DirectSound3D and EAX and Audiokinetic offers Wwise, which offers 3D audio capabilities to many games. AMD is still rolling with TrueAudio, but adoption for that is non-existent, in favor of third-party cross-platform options like the aforementioned ones, which TrueAudio currently does work with. Unfortunately, AMD has not put any dev resources into it since the COVID Pandemic, so it seems to be more or less abandoned by their corporate overlords.

In last decade, every AAA+ game is released on a multi-platform (PC, Mac, consoles) and publishers don't want to waste time/money on proprietary hardware-locked audio technologies. This is why EAX died and audio middleware (Wwise, FMOD) won out due to its software portability and user-friendly authoring tools.

Steam Audio is not a complete audio solution, it's a spatializer plug-in that integrates into built-in audio system (Unity, UE) or audio middleware (FMOD, Wwise, etc.).

As for VRWorks Audio and TrueAudio Next (TAN), this is more like proof-of-concept that audio processing can run on a GPU. If NVIDIA/AMD were truly interested on their technologies, they would have made integration plugins for popular game engines and audio middleware. But as I wrote above, no one needs that.

btw, it seems you missed Microsoft Project Acoustics, unfortunately this project was closed despite its promising future.

I found CMSS 3D to be disappointing due to rather strong side effects on sound quality. And it's pretty much hardcoded with no apparent possibility to tune it.

UCyborg wrote on 2026-01-18, 15:39:

I found CMSS 3D to be disappointing due to rather strong side effects on sound quality. And it's pretty much hardcoded with no apparent possibility to tune it.

As far as I remember, Creative CMSS-3D (Headphone mode) is a legacy of Sensaura's software-based algorithms and runs on the CPU (knowing Creative's greed, it's unlikely they ported it to X-Fi DSP).
It's a shame Creative didn't add a headphone setting like in the original Sensaura Virtual Ear.

UCyborg wrote on 2026-01-18, 15:39:

I found CMSS 3D to be disappointing due to rather strong side effects on sound quality. And it's pretty much hardcoded with no apparent possibility to tune it.

So i am not the only one. There are still instances where it does help a particular game but more often that not i prefer the original, cleaner sound of games. This is highly personal but i feel like the main reason for having a dedicated sound card it better/cleaner sound quality.

By the way, there's a cheap Auzentech X-Fi Prelude PCI for sale here, what is the general opinion on this card? Are the drivers just regular PCI X-Fi drivers?

IMO CMSS 3D was designed to make logitech speakers sound better, which were the vogue in the mid 2000s - High excursion full range drivers and no tweeters. If you have decent headphones or speakers it doesn't make changes in a positive way.

NeoG_ wrote on 2026-01-18, 23:21:

IMO CMSS 3D was designed to make logitech speakers sound better, which were the vogue in the mid 2000s - High excursion full range drivers and no tweeters. If you have decent headphones or speakers it doesn't make changes in a positive way.

From what little testing I've done with X-Fi CMSS-3D Headphone, I did notice that it improves positional audio, making it slightly more precise. This is especially noticeable with sound sources located above or below the player. And yeah, this was with a standard pair of stereo headphones.

Personally, I never found much use for CMSS when using speakers, though others may disagree.

NeoG_ wrote on 2026-01-18, 23:21:

IMO CMSS 3D was designed to make logitech speakers sound better, which were the vogue in the mid 2000s - High excursion full range drivers and no tweeters. If you have decent headphones or speakers it doesn't make changes in a positive way.

Creative had their own speakers and such, back then. They still do, to a certain degree, but they were big in the surround speaker market in the Windows XP days, rapidly losing market share when other brands, like Logitech, started creeping into stores like Best Buy, CompUSA, and others that were go-to places for computers and gaming. Cambridge Soundworks was their premium audio brand, but you rarely saw those speakers in retail and they were usually found via online retailers.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2026-01-18, 23:28:

NeoG_ wrote on 2026-01-18, 23:21:

IMO CMSS 3D was designed to make logitech speakers sound better, which were the vogue in the mid 2000s - High excursion full range drivers and no tweeters. If you have decent headphones or speakers it doesn't make changes in a positive way.

From what little testing I've done with X-Fi CMSS-3D Headphone, I did notice that it improves positional audio, making it slightly more precise. This is especially noticeable with sound sources located above or below the player. And yeah, this was with a standard pair of stereo headphones.

Personally, I never found much use for CMSS when using speakers, though others may disagree.

I agree with that. Cmss-3d essentially is developed to be used with headphones. It is true that it originated from Sensaura's Htrf implementation when Sensaura Technology was acquired by Creative sometime in the early 2000s. After quite a bit of research i came to the conclusion that the right settings for Cmss-3d to work properly are as it follows:

1. Windows control panel: Speaker configuration must be set to 5.1 (or 7.1)
2. Creative control panel: Headphone mode
3. Game Settings: Speaker configuration must be set to 5.1 or 7.1 or Surround

Dimos wrote on 2026-01-19, 22:33:

After quite a bit of research i came to the conclusion that the right settings for Cmss-3d to work properly are as it follows: […]
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After quite a bit of research i came to the conclusion that the right settings for Cmss-3d to work properly are as it follows:

1. Windows control panel: Speaker configuration must be set to 5.1 (or 7.1)
2. Creative control panel: Headphone mode
3. Game Settings: Speaker configuration must be set to 5.1 or 7.1 or Surround

I think it might vary from game to game.

For EAX 5.0 titles, Creative's official guides usually suggest setting the mode to "Headphones" both in Windows and their own app. But for older stuff, or non-EAX games, the approach you described might indeed produce better results. Again, my own testing on this was very limited as I don't normally use headphones. But in Battlefield 2142, I did try both approaches a while back, and I found Creative's officially recommended settings to work the best.

The logic behind this particular settings combination is that there are two kinds of games. The ones that they have their one build in htrf or spatial audio implementation and will disregard whatever you have chosen in the windows control panel. On the other side the ones that don't have that, so in that case the speaker setting in windows matters, cause the os takes responsibility of splitting the audio output to different channels.

Another thing: I think that when cmss-3d was developed it was tuned around six channels and works better with the 5.1 setting not 7.1. Do if 7.1 is selected in Windows Contol Panel or in-game, then the two extra channels aren't spacialized properly and that might result in not that good soundstage and the audio to be perceived as kind of "blurred".

MattRocks wrote on 2026-01-15, 15:20:

Sadly, due to having only Vista+ drivers, my X-Fi Titanium HD THX is a beautiful lemon - an anomaly that existed only for the small number of users who didn't see Microsoft's trap.

I believe there is a working custom WinXP driver from DanielK for the Titanium HD, this card still uses an E-MU 20K2 chip after all.
I might have tried it myself two years ago but I completely forgot the outcome, I think it worked as expected.

OM606 wrote on 2026-01-17, 15:47:

I've spent the whole day messing with CMSS-3D and i'd like to hear you opinion on this. I find that most of the times it makes the games sound weird, almost like some kind of flanger effect which isn't natural and very mid focused. It almost feels like there's some clipping going on at times or sound files are played at a lower bitrate. I wonder if there's a problem with my setup or even my ears. I'm using an X-Fi Titanium under both XP and 7 x64, 2.17.0008 driver, Audio Technica ATH-M50x plugged directly in the sound card. Creative console set to game mode/headphones.

Welcome to the club, I don't like CMSS-3D's HRTF either.

ott wrote on 2026-01-17, 17:23:

btw, it seems you missed Microsoft Project Acoustics, unfortunately this project was closed despite its promising future.

Project Acoustics now called Triton is alive and well. Microsoft decided to jealously keep the technology for their own first party studios instead.