[Evshrug]

Yamaha receivers include Silent Cinema for surround processing: I tweaked and found settings I liked, but it's better suited for movies than FPS games IMO, so I preferred to fed my Yamaha from my Creative's output. I probably could've survived just feeding an HDMI cable from my computer to the receiver, let the receiver be a DAC and amp. Either way you can use the receiver's remote to control volume and tone from afar, and a wireless keyboard/mouse or smartphone app such as Logitech's Touch Mouse app to control your computer. Obviously you would want the right tool for the job.

 

[badhomaks]

Since it says that xear 3d and similar things allow the use of eax in games, does that mean that you can run almost any game in EAX 5.0 with that technology?

 

[NamelessPFG]

Quote:

Can someone give me a quick rundown of the upgrades in sound cards for gaming in the past 13 years? It seems that only EAX became 5.0 from 1.0 or something like that and that's it.

 
It's a bit complicated, to say the least...especially if you want me to go back to the DOS days of competing sound card models. Seriously, there's plenty of discussion over at VOGONS and the Quest Studios forum as to which sound cards to go for and what to avoid, and not many people agree where the various Sound Blaster iterations are concerned. (Then you get into more exotic hardware like the Gravis Ultrasound...)
 
Here's the gist of it, where 3D audio under Windows is concerned:
 
-DirectSound3D was introduced in DirectX 3, but Microsoft made this stupid decision to make it only work with its own 3D algorithm at first.
-Aureal A3D and possibly other APIs were introduced in response to that, until Microsoft reversed their decision with DirectX 5 and made DirectSound3D audio coordinates usable by any 3D audio technology, be it Aureal, Creative, or anyone else's.
-Creative introduced EAX reverb/chorus/occlusion extensions to DirectSound3D later. Almost all devices support EAX 2.0, as it's basically part of DirectSound3D itself, but EAX 3.0 onward went Creative-only.
-OpenAL, yet another 3D audio API, was being developed for 3D sound in Linux game ports to my knowledge, but was eventually scooped up by Creative as their audio API of choice. Good move, too, seeing as DirectSound3D got the axe when Microsoft rewrote the sound stack for Windows Vista, while OpenAL remained intact due to its OS-independent nature.
 
As for what sound cards support what:
 
-As mentioned earlier, pretty much everything supports EAX 2.0, and also A3D 1.0. Even cheap Realtek codecs.
-Only Aureal Vortex2-based cards support A3D 2.0 and 3.0. I don't know of many games that really utilized the wavetracing and other features those versions had to offer, though.
-Out of Creative's offerings, the Live! series is limited to EAX 2.0, the Audigy line supports EAX 4.0, and the X-Fi line offers EAX 5.0. They also offer software driver packages like X-Fi MB that offer EAX 4/5 support on paper, but in practice, any game that actually uses EAX 5 in the first place (like Battlefield 2) doesn't really sound right on anything other than a real X-Fi card in Game Mode.

 

[Impulse]

Hey Nameless, I'm kinda confused by a discussion we were having on MLE's thread but it's really rather OT over there so I'm just gonna link it here and maybe you can shed some light... I know half of it is based on generalizations and assumptions off what current/future games are doing but still.

 

[NamelessPFG]

Retrieved from MLE's thread:
 
Quote:

Yeah, AFAIK orthos have a completely flat impedance curve that shouldn't interact with a high output impedance... (only relatively high in the STX's case, not like it's an OTL) I think I read somewhere the amp component on the E9/STX started out life as part of hardware used on DSL lines? Heh...

I'm into retro gaming, I just don't have the time or dedication to build rigs exclusively for it... If it hasn't been re-released on Steam or I can't get it working on Virtualbox I give up.

At least I've gotten some of the old school Lucasart adventure games working.

I'm jealous of the rigs you've got going tho! I'm petty sure I've got an old Diamond Monster 3D card gathering dust somewhere, can't remember if it was the original one or the MX300 tho. Is that thing of any use to ya?

Hell I'm petty sure I have an AWE32 too but my 486 has to be absolutely buried in storage, dunno why I even kept it there.
See, now that's the part I'm fuzzy on... Sheer ignorance on my part, just haven't looked into it tbh. I've always just enabled/disabled CMSS/DH on a whim depending on what I heard. Maybe Nameless can shed some light here, although maybe we should take this to his PC thread (I really gotta sub to it), but...

If a game's* doing it's own surround processing in software and you enable DH or CMSS, what happens? Are the latter working atop the former? Should the latter not be used in certain situations? Is it different between the two depending on the game engine/processing? (DH/CMSS)
*talking strictly modem games here

Edit: BTW, according to Nameless' guide the current versions of FMOD don't do OpenAl passthrough... Are there any modern/future titles actually still doing native OpenAl out there? I would think with Creative abandoning CMSS-3D that would provide little incentive for anyone to actually push 3D positional data forward...

Doesn't that mean we're pretty much limited to virtual 5.1 from here on out? Or are some new games providing true 3D surround emulation entirely in software? (but again, how does that interact with DH/CMSS?) Color me thoroughly confused...

 
If that Diamond Monster Sound card is an MX300 (Aureal Vortex2 AU8830-based), then color me interested. I'd still prefer the Aureal SQ2500 if I can find it, but it's not that big of a deal to get one specifically. I just happen to be using a Turtle Beach Montego II because that's what a local computer store had to offer for dirt cheap; I sift through old hardware for things like that.
 
Now, as for your following questions, we need to clear up the kind of processing that the game engine's doing to the sound in software:
 
-Reverb/chorus/occlusion/etc., the stuff that used to be the domain of EAX. It's easy to do all that in software now, and there's no interference with CMSS-3D, DH, etc., unless DH is set to DH3 mode with ridiculous reverb levels adding to what's already in the game audio.
-Actual sound positioning. The thing is, most games these days position sounds by telling them how loud to play over a given 7.1 speaker position, and nothing more. That is why we want CMSS-3D, DH, etc. for these games still, as the surround channels aren't downmixed properly without them (you won't hear anything coming from those channels), and setting the game itself to use stereo generally results in only left/right audio panning because there are only two speakers to adjust the volume of.
 
I still have yet to find a game that provides a native binaural headphone mix in software. Even though FMOD has a supposed HRTF feature, it's just some kind of lowpass filter for sounds behind you, not a real HRTF-based mix. Even A3D, DS3D, and OAL games technically don't offer native binaural mixes, in the sense that they're not really mixing the game audio-the sound card (or software audio renderer, in cases like Rapture3D) is doing the mixing based on the 3D coordinates given.
 
If we want proper 3D binaural audio to survive, we're going to have to push the popular middleware developers to add it natively to FMOD, Wwise, etc., since I don't see the game development industry at large moving back to OpenAL for whatever reason. If it works out as well as I hope, then even console games would have a native binaural headphone mix for once.

 

[Impulse]

-Actual sound positioning. The thing is, most games these days position sounds by telling them how loud to play over a given 7.1 speaker position, and nothing more. That is why we want CMSS-3D, DH, etc. for these games still, as the surround channels aren't downmixed properly without them (you won't hear anything coming from those channels), and setting the game itself to use stereo generally results in only left/right audio panning because there are only two speakers to adjust the volume of

I still have yet to find a game that provides a native binaural headphone mix in software. Even though FMOD has a supposed HRTF feature, it's just some kind of lowpass filter for sounds behind you, not a real HRTF-based mix. Even A3D, DS3D, and OAL games technically don't offer native binaural mixes, in the sense that they're not really mixing the game audio-the sound card (or software audio renderer, in cases like Rapture3D) is doing the mixing based on the 3D coordinates given.

Okay, that's what I thought originally but yesterday's discussion threw me off... So realistically, CMSS-3D won't have a positional advantage over DH with any modern title (in the technical sense) since they're all just gonna feed 5.1/7.1 data into either scheme? I imaging some games don't even manage that much and you just end up with up-mixed virtual surround from a stereo signal yeah? (I'm guessing those are the games where I didn't care for CMSS/DH)

If we want proper 3D binaural audio to survive, we're going to have to push the popular middleware developers to add it natively to FMOD, Wwise, etc., since I don't see the game development industry at large moving back to OpenAL for whatever reason. If it works out as well as I hope, then even console games would have a native binaural headphone mix for once.

So if that were to happen, then we wouldn't even need CMSS-3D or DH no? The game itself would presumably just go to that binaural mix when you tell it you're using headphones instead of selecting 5.1/7.1 as usual... (please correct me if I'm wrong ) Is there any signs we're actually headed in that direction? I don't know why it hasn't happened, seems like such an obvious path with today's rigs where extra cores and cycles are just sitting there idle.

I mean, gaming with headphones is so prevalent right now due to voice chat and living situations. It's not even about the noise, my PC's just never gonna be in a spot where a speaker surround system fits, (unless I build an HTPC). I imagine it's a fairly common scenario, specially with so many people moving to laptops (never!). Plus it's like win/win, console gamers get something they've never had before (without extra hardware, and consoles can definitely spare the processing power by now), and PC gamers get to more easily decouple all audio duties from inside their systems.

In a sense it seems kinda similar to the situation with game physics... There's already one GPU-accelerated scheme that works pretty good, but it's proprietary and NV's never gonna open it up. So most games just do a passable job of it in software and maybe throw out a bone for PhysX (like Baman AA), with a few exceptions (like Borderlands 2 which made me wanna switch to NV cards but my 6950s aren't worth upgrading yet).

At least NV has a reason to keep throwing money at PhysX, but ultimately it's on the same road as DS3D and OAL, albeit for different reasons (almost opposite reasons).


P.S. I'll dig up my old cards and figure out what I've got btw, I'll let ya know. Thanks for all the insight btw.

 

[Evshrug]

Okay, that's what I thought originally but yesterday's discussion threw me off... So realistically, CMSS-3D won't have a positional advantage over DH with any modern title (in the technical sense) since they're all just gonna feed 5.1/7.1 data into either scheme? I imaging some games don't even manage that much and you just end up with up-mixed virtual surround from a stereo signal yeah? (I'm guessing those are the games where I didn't care for CMSS/DH).

FWIR, the most recent games that offer height positional cues (advantage) either have openAL buried inside (like Borderlands2), or have DS3D or some other surround API translated to an OpenAl wrapper (I think this is what ALchemy does, right?) because they were built-in to the game engine like games from Valve's Source engine or the Unreal engine. Did Hawks 2 have 3D audio coordinates?

So if that were to happen, then we wouldn't even need CMSS-3D or DH no? The game itself would presumably just go to that binaural mix when you tell it you're using headphones instead of selecting 5.1/7.1 as usual... (please correct me if I'm wrong ) Is there any signs we're actually headed in that direction? I don't know why it hasn't happened, seems like such an obvious path with today's rigs where extra cores and cycles are just sitting there idle.

I mean, gaming with headphones is so prevalent right now due to voice chat and living situations. It's not even about the noise, my PC's just never gonna be in a spot where a speaker surround system fits, (unless I build an HTPC). I imagine it's a fairly common scenario, specially with so many people moving to laptops (never!). Plus it's like win/win, console gamers get something they've never had before (without extra hardware, and consoles can definitely spare the processing power by now), and PC gamers get to more easily decouple all audio duties from inside their systems.

In a sense it seems kinda similar to the situation with game physics... There's already one GPU-accelerated scheme that works pretty good, but it's proprietary and NV's never gonna open it up. So most games just do a passable job of it in software and maybe throw out a bone for PhysX (like Baman AA), with a few exceptions (like Borderlands 2 which made me wanna switch to NV cards but my 6950s aren't worth upgrading yet).

At least NV has a reason to keep throwing money at PhysX, but ultimately it's on the same road as DS3D and OAL, albeit for different reasons (almost opposite reasons).
.

So, do you have the same sense that I do? That, now more than ever, headphone surround is a ripe open market? I mean seriously, it could EASILY be integrated into the next gen consoles that are on the horizon (though maybe too late for PS4... Sony's gaming Facebook, really?). On a side note, you may be interested to know that Tom's Hardware recently published an article about how NVidia has licensed PhysX to the PS4, interesting because the PS4 runs on AMD hardware, but I think NVidia is making the savvy move I'd been raving for Creative to take where they get their tech into consoles, so that games actually take advantage of the features.

PS, for me, it IS time to upgrade my graphics card. Suggest getting a GTX 570 for $180 (before a $30 rebate) or buying a $175 HD7850 which includes Tomb Raider and Bioshock Infinite? I really would love to have PhysX, but of course I like games... I think Bioshock will have PhysX, and maybe they'll have 3D audio like the first game (dunno about the 2nd).

 

[Impulse]

Yeah I think there's a huge un-exploited market, it just hasn't congealed yet (so to speak), too many peripheral/gamer companies & brands milking it from the side with gimmicky headsets in the meantime. Hadn't heard that about PhysX, on the one hand it doesn't surprise me from NV... They lost the hardware bid and still managed to find a way to milk money out of that console, it's pretty savvy, on the other hand it's kind of a diss to PC gamers if they don't eventually cooperate in some way to get a cross-vendor standard for GPU-accelerated physics.

I really haven't kept up with GPU pricing and news, tho I guess nothing new's been released in a while (Titan or whatever aside)... Shouldn't we be well into next-gen GTX 7xx/HD 8xxx by now? I bought my two 6950s for like $235 each, and that was just over two years ago. They weren't even brand new, had been out for a few months by then. The GTX 570 is it's contemporary and maybe on par with it or slightly faster depending on game and res no? My point is, current pricing/performance ratio's just weak... 'Course that's easy for me to say because my cards are still getting it done for the most part, can't play some of the newer games comfortably in EF anymore but I've still got a few 1-2 year old titles to get thru anyway.

Is there any news about next gen cards? Skimming a Titan review it seemed like NV was expecting something soon from AMD and it didn't materialize... Best time to buy is a month or two after a new line is out IMO, you either get a brand new card that will last you a couple years or you get a bargain on previous gen stuff. If you absolutely must upgrade now neither of those two bundles sound bad tho, just keep in mind you're basically paying $25 for the two games... In 2-3 months tops you can probably pick up at least one of the two for the same price.

I don't even remember how the 7850 stacks up, but always pick the fastest card(s) for the money IMO, then from those find the best bundle/warranty/HSF. I'll pay a slight premium ($10-15) for the latter but not more. Anyway, on-topic:

FWIR, the most recent games that offer height positional cues (advantage) either have openAL buried inside (like Borderlands2), or have DS3D or some other surround API translated to an OpenAl wrapper (I think this is what ALchemy does, right?) because they were built-in to the game engine like games from Valve's Source engine or the Unreal engine. Did Hawks 2 have 3D audio coordinates?

I thought that current versions of Half Life and Valve's other Source games actually didn't do anything but 5.1/7.1 mixing even if you forced it thru ALchemy (least that's the impression I got on Steam forums a while ago), though the engine definitely did support DS3D at one point in it's life...

I guess there's a way to hack it in tho? Or do you have to go thru some sort of extreme (for the average gamer) like running it on WinXP?

It makes sense that Borderlands 2 still supports OpenAl I guess since it uses the Unreal engine... Kinda sad that the games running on engines that are getting long in the tooth are potentially the better sounding ones.

 

[Evshrug]

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/PhysX-APEX-CUDA-PlayStation-SDK,21402.html

The GTX 570, GTX 660, and HD7850 are all about par, trading games where they are better optimized, though the 660 eeks out a bit ahead. The GTX 570 has the most memory bandwidth, but I'm not sure how much that matters. The GTX 570 costs about the same as the HD7850, but then it has a $30 rebate attached to it. I feel like, long run, I'll be happier with the 570, and later I can pick up another to SLI if I want more power, but basically that one card has enough power to impress me right now. In the short run though Tomb Raider looks like an awesome game, and who knows how long the multiplayer will stay alive? And I've got a LARGE backlog of games to play... Basically, I never owned a gaming PC except that one time my mom let me install Star Wars Podracing, X-wing vs Tie Fighter, and Falcon 4.0 on her desktop, which we affectionately called "the rock" until I dropped it off for recycling this year.

I don't know anything about the next-gen cards, do they usually cycle in less than a year? Seems like both companies only just released their mid-range cards...

I wonder if the new Unreal engine (featured in "the Samaritan" demo video) will still incorporate OpenAL. As an open-source API, it's not like it's expensive...

 

[Impulse]

They just released their mid range cards? The GTX 660 came out like August of last year and it was way late to the party, I think it was basically one of the last current gen cards released (GHz editions and all that re-release crap notwithstanding)... The 670 came out last May, it's now almost April. At one point the GPU market was crazier than like the Android phone market, new launches happened like every 8 months. It hit a lull around umm, 2003/2004? NV re-released their 8800 line like half a dozen times, not even kidding (that's how far we've cycled tho, where product models for A have started to look like those from B 10 yrs ago, heh). Later on they settled on yearly releases like clockwork.

They're kinda due by now, specially if you take into account the fact that NV was trailing AMD last year... The 79xx came out in February and enjoyed a couple of months without direct competitors. The 78xx came out last March!

Anyway, 2GB was one of the motivations for me on the 6950 vs 570 at the time, but you're probably looking at 1GB 7850's and RAM isn't nearly as relevant if you're not playing at a crazy multi-display high res... At the same time, the 570 is one generation behind already and that might affect availability if you're looking to SLI as an upgrade path (tho that's rarely worth it IMO, unless new cards fall way behind schedule). OTOH, I've been reading for a while how SLI is often smoother than CF. My 6950 are the first SLI/CF setup I've used btw. Future proofing and planning ahead and all that is generally just pointless, which is why I said I'd take the fastest card for the money.

If you're dying to play those two games tho (I know I am) AND you'll actually play them as soon as you can get them (I know I probably won't ) then the $25 premium is a good deal.

Kind of a toss up really, the newer card should enjoy better driver support and optimizations but AMD's always lagging NV in that regard. It's not as bad as when they were ATI but still... The GPU market has a surprising amount of parity compared to others. The last card I got before the 6950's was a GTX 260 and I basically settled on it because it was shorter than the HD 4970 and fit better in my case, they were that close in every other regard, heh. I've had way more NV cards tho, mostly by chance and because they were dominant earlier than ATI/AMD. First 3D card was a 3dfx Voodoo (the original one). I think it went into the same 133 MHz Pentium (1) rig as the Monster 3D audio card I was telling Nameless about, or was it the PII... Ok, imma stop aging myself now...

 

[Evshrug]

I remember our first discrete graphics card, I think it was impressive-ish for having 1 MB of VRAM. By the time PodRacing came out (also available on the N64), the card could barely keep up, lol. I said it seems the mid-range 660 and 660ti just recently came out (recent enough that the price hasn't dropped much), but maybe it only seems that way to me because last year was so frustratingly devoid of significant moments of progress in my life. My grandfather wanted me to sell real estate, random companies wanted me to sell Internet and health insurance, my girlfriend wanted me to sell photography, I didn't want to sell anything just work on generating new stuff for other people to sell... meh.

Maybe we'll see new stuff soon... In Tom's article on the upcoming HD 7790, the author basically said it will be the last card of this generation. Maybe they're having a hard time making faster, more economical processors? Or maybe the PC market hasn't been very profitable since the Xbox 360 and the PS2 before that hit their strides as systems that provided massive libraries of games designed to work on the same hardware over long time periods? I'm "new" to the PC gaming enthusiast scene, so I appreciate your tips about timing.

 

[ninjikiran]

might sound stupid but on the phoebus sound card, how do I properly set up Dolby HTv4 to always output the best surround mix.  Its confusing, with little visuals as to if its working properly and even less documentation.

 

[NamelessPFG]

Quote:

And I've got a LARGE backlog of games to play... Basically, I never owned a gaming PC except that one time my mom let me install Star Wars Podracing, X-wing vs Tie Fighter, and Falcon 4.0 on her desktop, which we affectionately called "the rock" until I dropped it off for recycling this year.

 
Falcon 4.0, of all things...if you've still got the original CD lying around, you could set up Falcon BMS 4.32 with it!
 
That'll make great use of your new PC, though the sheer attention to detail of the F-16C's subsystems means that you're gonna be spending the first several hours just learning how to fly the thing...and you're gonna want a full-fledged HOTAS. Preferably a Thrustmaster HOTAS Cougar modded to the gills like I had once, but that's very expensive when you start getting into the force-sensing mods and whatnot.
 
Still, you said your family mostly consisted of Mac users back then, right? It's not like the Classic Mac OS didn't have its fair share of game ports, though there were things that still remained exclusive to DOS and Windows...(and also the other way around, for that matter.)

 

[Impulse]

Didn't Bungie (of Halo) start off on Mac? Kind of ironic they'd end up developing for MS' console...

 

[NamelessPFG]

Quote:

Didn't Bungie (of Halo) start off on Mac? Kind of ironic they'd end up developing for MS' console...

 
They did. Some of their older titles like Pathways Into Darkness still haven't been ported from the Classic Mac OS.
 
Heck, Halo itself was introduced as a Mac game-an RTS, at that-but then it went all third-person shooter and Mac/Windows, and then Microsoft decided that their Xbox needed a killer app, saw what Bungie was doing, and the rest is history.