What? MS didn't give a shit about its audio stack, what it gave a shit about was (creative and others) drivers running in ring 0. Remember how Vista was a buggy POS with bluescreens? It wasn't Vista so per say, but Creative & Nidia with Ring 0 calls causing seg faults. WDDM from Vista onwards abstracted that. Even then, Microsoft did work to allow those cards direct access without going thru the mixer in 7 (and retroactively applied to Vista via patch to WDDM).
What?? I even crawled out of my bed out of frustration! Keep your facts straight. M$ killed direct sound API and WDM/kernel streaming. Mark that with NT5. NT6 was so raw and hasted it had its audio stack is tied with LAN stack, plain zero - NT6.0 has nothing to do with the past. They didn't actually give a s**** as long EAX was dead and they could not do anything about it too. Actually there were straws from direct sound we are seeing in the OS that are Xbox related software based Xaudio2 fruits due to common base. Actually there so much bad things around that time. Death of Sensaura3D, Glide... and also OpenAL... because it failed to evolve(Doppler effect only), okay Creative did some zombie stuff with Aalchemy thanks to OpenAL, and thanks to them... to do that for free... at least in the end. WASAPI was added just naturally as a kernel feature and not as a patch(it just cannot be otherwise)... actually they started to iron out things, don't blame M$ for everything also, they tried, okay they burned badly, but they still try, as with Redstone 2 they added USB Audio 2.0 Class and spatial audio. They are aware of virtual reality and latency issues... it's a new priority. We have to forget the past, it just cannot work anymore. Skip it... if only one creates some custom DSP intercepting like FMOD calls and doing on a custom DSP... yeah... why not... but just why nowadays? Our CPU's are are like behemoths versus 2004, that's why I am more concerned about the analog and hardware part where inaccuracy, cheapskate and pure scam that actually occurs seeing the hardware.
Okay... what did it cause? Creating of HDA, bunch of deaf people, actually audio became less important and pushed into the back because graphics made the main role, you may judge me over this argument but it is what it is, before it just made more sense due to lack of hardware and GFX power to deliver mood and emotion.
So in the end? What we have here? Still a crap gamer product, limited on the HW side thus the strong critique from me. Drivers are fine for Creative actually... haven't had an issue for a while nor win or linux. Blaming M$? Okay, have you ever reported some bugs and logs to them? I have, they solved it! I beg your pardon, you?
It'll happen that I'll probably have new soundcard before I'll have a new graphic card hehe
