[pmc64]

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/hardware/br259116.aspx 
 
I saw someone post this in the creative forums but I don't really understand it. What do you guys think of it?

 

[NamelessPFG]

They should have never removed it to begin with!
 
Sure, the Vista/Win7 sound stack is said to be quite improved from the old KMixer in XP and prior, but I don't see the reason why hardware acceleration had to be cut out. For that matter, I don't see how going from a 3D sound space mixed by the sound card driver (as DirectSound3D portrays sound) as opposed to a sound space pre-mixed to 7.1 at most and stereo at least in software before it hits the sound card driver (as XAudio2 and current versions of FMOD do it) is an improvement in the least.
 
On the other hand...OpenAL was never affected. This is why wrappers like ALchemy work to restore hardware-accelerated audio in older games, and it's not needed in games that use it directly for hardware acceleration. My guess is that it's because it's essentially a separate entity from the Windows sound stack to begin with.
 
Nevertheless, I still feel that wrapping DirectSound3D to OpenAL should be a wholly unnecessary step. Microsoft had no reason to cut it out while redesigning the sound stack.