Microsoft Selects Dolby Audio for Windows 10

[Easy Rhino]

I do not agree. It all depens on the games. Just look at what Battlefield games are doing with audio.

A lot of modern games have great audio. What I like the most is the quality of all the recordings and sounds. Old games had a lot of fancy effects, but overall sound quality and number of sounds was terrible

I am confused. Admittedly I don't know much about audio hardware acceleration. But can't the OS handle audio hardware acceleration if you have any sort of audio chip (either embedded or discrete) ? I am pretty sure then that this press release is merely for marketing purposes and with Windows 10 you will still have other vendors supply drivers for audio hardware acceleration. No?

 

[RejZoR]

I know everyone thinks this is an excellent idea, but with quad core CPUs being standard now, and good performance all around, what does hardware accelerated audio do anymore that OpenAL can't on the CPU?

I mean... it was useful when we were cramming all effects into a single threaded pentium 4. Not sure about now.

Because software audio sucks major balls. It's bland, everything sounds the same "plasticky" with fake material effects attached to them and has appalling 3D space positioning where you can hardly tell where enemies really are.

I'm just playing System Shock 2, a GOG version that supports OpenAL and 48 channels with EAX 2.0 (this game supported EAX 2.0 even back then, just through DS3D and with only 16 channels) and the audio segment of it blows any modern game out of the sky. And it's a freaking title from 1999. When you walk over metal surfaces you actually feel like you're walking on metal. Hit a metal wall with a wrench and you can just sense the vibrations of the wall. Hitting an indestructible glass window gives the same vibe. Dropping rifle on top of a rifle with metal colliding noise or dropping a bottle of orange juice, the noise of echoing machines rumbling in a room or a hall, the echoing distant noises of hybrids who mumble to themselves etc. It's just not comparable.

Or a simple comparison of Need for Speed 3 Hot Pursuit where you race through a tunnel with a car using EAX. It sounded so good you just can't describe it. Not a single NFS game after Porsche 2000 (basically when they scraped EAX support) is capable of capturing that because reverberation plain and simply sucks.

Of course you don't see any difference in performance if everyone use shitty software audio with shitty cheap effects just so they don't cause any drag on the CPU. EAX 5.0 supports real time audio reflection and occlusion, basically audio ray tracing with multiple effects attached to each reflection and with soft transitions between environment effects. Drag wouldn't be as big as it used to be 20 years ago, but it would still be a problem on weak CPU's. Until you hear that in motion, I'm sure you don't miss real proper audio. Growing up with Aureal Vortex powered soundcard and the 6th generation of Sound Blaster, I'm someone who greatly appreciates high quality in-game audio. Just making loud explosions and talking about soundcards that have SNR of 3 billion decibels means nothing to me. That's not how you measure audio quality in games. Making sound that gives you the immersion of actually standing there, however does. It has to feel organic with the game, not disconnected from it like all these shitty software audio engines used by 99.9% of games released these days...

 

[remixedcat]

and OMG I'm talking to someone that posted to dolby lab's facebook page and they ripped him off too... greedy bastids!

 

[MikeMurphy]

Do we need hardware accelerated audio these days? Even a dual core CPU can handle all the bells and whistles.

128+ channels of simultaneous audio can create quite a load. The only reason MS stripped Vista and newer OSs of H/W accelerated audio was to make it more difficult to pirate streamed media.

 

[Uplink10]

Yeah, PCM is uncompressed audio, minus channel improvements how can you really beat that? lol.

Dolby TrueHD and DTS HD MA audio when uncompressed is about 9 Mbps or 12 Mbps depending on the channels and that means that it has almost or a little over twice the bitrate of LPCM. It saves you a lot of space.

FOSS guys at Mozilla and Google aren't going to go for this.

I would not call Google Chrome FOSS project, Chromium and projects like AOSP are FOSS but Chrome and Google's Android are not a FOSS project.

 

[R-T-B]

Because software audio sucks major balls. It's bland, everything sounds the same "plasticky" with fake material effects attached to them and has appalling 3D space positioning where you can hardly tell where enemies really are.

I'm just playing System Shock 2, a GOG version that supports OpenAL and 48 channels with EAX 2.0 (this game supported EAX 2.0 even back then, just through DS3D and with only 16 channels) and the audio segment of it blows any modern game out of the sky. And it's a freaking title from 1999. When you walk over metal surfaces you actually feel like you're walking on metal. Hit a metal wall with a wrench and you can just sense the vibrations of the wall. Hitting an indestructible glass window gives the same vibe. Dropping rifle on top of a rifle with metal colliding noise or dropping a bottle of orange juice, the noise of echoing machines rumbling in a room or a hall, the echoing distant noises of hybrids who mumble to themselves etc. It's just not comparable.

Or a simple comparison of Need for Speed 3 Hot Pursuit where you race through a tunnel with a car using EAX. It sounded so good you just can't describe it. Not a single NFS game after Porsche 2000 (basically when they scraped EAX support) is capable of capturing that because reverberation plain and simply sucks.

Of course you don't see any difference in performance if everyone use shitty software audio with shitty cheap effects just so they don't cause any drag on the CPU. EAX 5.0 supports real time audio reflection and occlusion, basically audio ray tracing with multiple effects attached to each reflection and with soft transitions between environment effects. Drag wouldn't be as big as it used to be 20 years ago, but it would still be a problem on weak CPU's. Until you hear that in motion, I'm sure you don't miss real proper audio. Growing up with Aureal Vortex powered soundcard and the 6th generation of Sound Blaster, I'm someone who greatly appreciates high quality in-game audio. Just making loud explosions and talking about soundcards that have SNR of 3 billion decibels means nothing to me. That's not how you measure audio quality in games. Making sound that gives you the immersion of actually standing there, however does. It has to feel organic with the game, not disconnected from it like all these shitty software audio engines used by 99.9% of games released these days...

What OS were you playing system shock2 on?

I ask because eax 3 and below is actually done on the CPU in modern creative drivers... And it isn't that taxing.

 

[RejZoR]

Originally it was Windows 98SE and later Windows XP (that was with Sound Blaster Live! 5.1, Audigy 2 Value and later with SB X-Fi. This time it is on Windows 8.1, but is using OpenAL and SB Z so I don't know how is with that. Besides, EAX 2.0 is just reverberation and spatialization engine. It has no sound reflection or occlusion. It must have either some sort of better HRTF incorporated or it's just my SB Z doing that because of OpenAL. Because when I move around or sounds move around me in game I can locate the sound with such accuracy I could walk through the game with my eyes closed. I hardly ever get that in any modern game.

Either way, I don't care, it sounds so much better than anything else even with EAX 2.0...

 

[Prima.Vera]

I do not agree. It all depens on the games. Just look at what Battlefield games are doing with audio.
A lot of modern games have great audio. What I like the most is the quality of all the recordings and sounds. Old games had a lot of fancy effects, but overall sound quality and number of sounds was terrible

Battlefield games have good sound but that's it. There is no spatial sound, no reverberation depending on the environment, everything is just laud. that's all. Sorry but you never played Unreal (the original game), Thief or FEAR 2 it seems. In Unreal 1, even from the first mission, you can clearly hear the big fans spinning above your head, electric sparks coming from everywhere, and sewage flowing under you. All on the same time! The sound is so unbelievable realistic, specially on A3D 2.0 cards or EAX 4.

 

[Easy Rhino]

128+ channels of simultaneous audio can create quite a load. The only reason MS stripped Vista and newer OSs of H/W accelerated audio was to make it more difficult to pirate streamed media.

But won't third party drivers for Vista and newer take care of this?

 

[Ruru]

Screw this, I want EAX back.