Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2026-02-25, 20:44:

But on the topic of DanielK's drivers and OpenAL, in his release notes, he states that the issue has been addressed in the latest version of his X-Fi support pack (8.0 Refresh 3).

This is encouraging, as I could definitely use those drivers for the Forte. It does say the Forte won’t save settings unless you disable and reenable the card, which is kinda bothersome—but it’s also true that sound card settings lean on the “set and forget” side. If I end up not enjoying my experience, I can always resell the Forte and get the Titanium HD.

AndreaColombo86 wrote on 2026-02-25, 21:13:

This is encouraging, as I could definitely use those drivers for the Forte. It does say the Forte won’t save settings unless you disable and reenable the card, which is kinda bothersome—but it’s also true that sound card settings lean on the “set and forget” side. If I end up not enjoying my experience, I can always resell the Forte and get the Titanium HD.

The "won't save settings" thing is caused by fast startup feature in windows 8-11, which you should disable btw, but win7 doesn't even have that.

God Of Gaming wrote on Yesterday, 05:45:

The "won't save settings" thing is caused by fast startup feature in windows 8-11, which you should disable btw, but win7 doesn't even have that.

Very good to know, thank you for the information 😊

Incredible...fast startup is nothing more than "log off all users and hibernate, then resume on power up", it does speed up getting back to Windows from powered down state, especially if using HDD.

You can actually disable and re-enable Forte? Doing that with Audigy Rx just crashes the OS. The drivers for these cards are truly craptastic. So removing DirectSound HAL in terms of stability didn't do much. There's no recovering from errors like with GPU drivers...though with old ATI cards, it only worked partially in my experience (first time, driver was reset, second time, BSOD).