This is based on my own limited experience, so take these findings with a grain of salt. While many ISA sound cards from that time claim to support DirectSound, it seems to work best on Creative Labs products, especially the AWE64. Doesn't matter if it's the Gold or Value version of the AWE64, as long as you use the drivers from the official installation CD, all DirectSound games from that time (e.g. Diablo, Tomb Raider 2 and Quake 2) will sound great.

With other (non-Creative) ISA sound cards, I've had mixed results. Often, I encountered some crackling or stuttering when playing DirectSound games under Win95. For the record, I tried an ESS AudioDrive 1868F, Avance Logic ALS100, OPTi 82C930 (worst of the bunch for Win95) and CMI8330 based on-board audio. The only way to get smooth sound with those was to completely disable sound hardware acceleration. But that puts unnecessary strain on the CPU, which can be felt if you're using a Pentium MMX or something similar.

DirectX versions prior to 7 had a bunch of device drivers for specific hardware and thus would have .INFs to answer this question (the DirectX installer used to offer replacing your existing video and/or sound drivers)

A quick glance at DirectX3 (September 1996) shows Aztech Sound Galaxy 16, ESS688-1688-1788, Mediavision PAS16, Microsoft Sound System and Sound Blaster 16/AWE32 drivers

Then sb16/awe32/64, pas16, mss is ok.
And what about terratec ews64 xxl, Profimedia Maestro 16/96, base1, gravis pnp/ace/extreme, ensoniq s2000 about this time period?

Usually ESS Audiodrive and Yamaha OPL-SAx cards are are fuss free with Windows 9x DirectSound.

Is there any card that is "not compatible with DirectSound"? At the end of the day even the simplest of the cards is going to be compatible by simply mixng everything in software...

Wouldn't a better question be which cards are actually accelerated by DirectSound ? I know for example that EMU10K1-era cards from Creative should be, because EMU10k1 offers hardware mixing support, but I don't know of anything else . Anything before EMU10K1 doesn't; AWE cards do not support hardware mixing, so DirectSound "compatibility" is meaningless...

To be not compatible, you can use a sound driver intended for Windows 3.x and it'll be delayed quite a bit (assuming it works at all) and can't be accelerated by Directsound. Some 93-94 WSS cards were stuck doing it this way.

It's more about buffers than mixing voices.

Drivers for 3.x are practically the same as VxD drivers for 9x. It is only until WDM that there is actually multiple voices support.

What does "buffers" mean here? What can it possibly accelerate when the card only has one?

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previ ... 9(v=vs.85)
seems to hint that one difference is that DirectSound on 95 bypasses the actual sound card drivers, thus allowing dsound programs exclusive access to the sound card and the ability to set its own output sample format and avoid resampling/etc from the sound driver. But as it also mentions, that is no longer the case in 98/WDM... unless the card has hardware mixing support, and those are quite rare.

I'd imagine that the only possible source of performance difference is that the waveOut API sucks? But then any card would benefit from dsound, leaving me confused...

Gravis Ultrasound GUS cards are DirectSound incompatible for a fact.

Most sound cards produced in 1998 and later would have hardware mixing. The first I remember is the Diamond Monster Sound MX200/M80 with the Analog Devices chipset with DSP based Aureal A3D. That is actually a 1997 card.

Aureal then built their Vortex ASICs. I don't think Vortex Advantage is hardware accelerated but Vortex 1 and 2 are.

Live is Creative's first card. The cards that use AudioPCI chips are software. So are motherboard integrated and USB chips.

ESS Maestro and later PCI chips.

Philips / VLSI Thunderbird.

Crystal CS46XX.

CMedia CMI 8738.

Few motherboard solutions are hardware except the CMedia 8738.

This is just from memory.

The Win9x DirectX sound acceleration slider lets you control how directly Windows uses the sound card's driver's features or bypasses all of it. The driver can implement its own processing that appears as hardware mixing to the OS.

On the WAV API output, at least the Live can play more simultaneously even with VXD. It has a control panel applet to set the limit.

leileilol wrote on 2024-12-15, 09:00:

DirectX versions prior to 7 had a bunch of device drivers for specific hardware and thus would have .INFs to answer this question (the DirectX installer used to offer replacing your existing video and/or sound drivers)

A quick glance at DirectX3 (September 1996) shows Aztech Sound Galaxy 16, ESS688-1688-1788, Mediavision PAS16, Microsoft Sound System and Sound Blaster 16/AWE32 drivers

Thx for that useful information, with the PAS16 DX3 sound drivers the stuttering is gone!