Sooo, In a nostalgic mood I researched about building a retro win2000 machine. I got as far as the soundcard choice. Aureal Vortex2 or Creative EAX2? 1st has superior positioning and the 2nd has superior sound- effects and only simulated positioning. It is known that Creative and Aureal had a legal dispute which left Aureal, although victorious, in financial trouble. Creative bought the Aureal A3D positioning tech and... filed it somewhere. Creative pushed it's own EAX and never did anything with A3D anymore, at least, not to my knowledge. Enter Win Vista. EAX5 died a death with no support from Vista. Granted, we've got other simulated 3D sound now. Half-Life 2 uses Miles, I believe and there's the Dolby Headphone and now Atmos. And yet... I have not tried Atmos yet and I've only had the vague notion of software based Atmos for PC coming. Is there any other movement in the hardware based 3D sound tech for PC? While the quality has been upped significantly ( though still has a LOT of potential to improve ), I feel like there hasn't been an innovation in 3D PC sound for the last ... what... 15 years now? Please, if there is, do inform me. Make me happy I just want to be amazed again, playing a game.
I'm mostly posting as a bookmark for this thread. It is nice to have EAX working in some older games (have a card/system that supports it now, where I didn't before), and it is a nice touch. I have a 5.1 surround system, and whatever these games are using, it's working pretty well: positional audio is almost always pretty solid; sound filters (echo in rooms, none in open areas, whatever) comes and goes, but it seems like it's more based on how well the game adopted the standard at the time.
It's all proprietary now and no open standards really. NVIDIA has VRWorks Audio, AMD has TrueAudio Next, there's Steam Audio, audiokinetic Wwise spatial... VRWorks Audio example (it does sound pretty daumn good):
Since CPUs had more cores and became much faster there has been little need for hardware based audio processing. A spare CPU core can be used as an audio co processor. This is why there are more software based engines.
There are many problems with that now though, it would rapidly become a hindrance instead of a benefit unless most people bought that hardware (assuming the IP was protected and simulation wasnt allowed), and even then what benefit could it bring? Everything can be performed in software now with no detriment to framerate. The industry is slow to change/improve audio standards, this would slow it even more and create different standards of gaming based on audio hardware. When we had hardware audio processing it was much needed and brought serious benefits. Rose tinted spectacles sadly.
Well, this was worth logging in for. Thanks for all the examples. I'm surprised I've not heard of any of them yet. Is Steam Audio a part of SteamVR and perhaps the reason why I have not heard of it even when logging into Steam News daily? I'm very pleasantly surprised. Anarion, do you have any direct links to said technologies with techdemo's and explanations? This sounds a tad lazy, I know ^^. Thanks !
While i agree that modern software based audio can meet and in many cases exceed the hardware solutions of the past, one should keep in mind that there is a huge difference between being able to do 3d positional audio processing via software and being able to do it as good as before when it was hardware based. The reason why 3d positional and environmental audio was so much better than it is today is due to the industry abandoning spherical surround audio which processed sound elevation above and below the multichannel plane, and transitioned to a much more simplified 5.1/7.1 circular surround audio processing
Well, Check out Audeze's new Mobius headphones. it might be the future. Too bad it doesn't have PS3/4 support.
What about the upcoming "creative super x-fi" the headphone holography ? It's an USB dongle to make all headphones sound like the real world. There should be an free app for mobile phones soon, just to give us a sample how it will sound. Before the hardware solution roll out. https://us.creative.com/sxfi/
hm, curious. Few questions though: - Is it a dongle by itself or is it a dongle/headphones combo? - Not a lot of space to get come quality capacitors in there, though the DragonFly dongles achieve very nice SQ as well. - Is it the tech that's presented or just the dongle? ( would we see full size soundcards based on that SX-FI SOC ? ) I'm still a bit sceptic about it, but I'm open to amazement
Well you can see some CES 2018 Creative presentations on youtube. There should be a Mobilephone Software Version first, before the hardware is released, but only works on Mobile Phones and is probabely not as precise as the hardware one. It is just the dongle where you habe to plug in your own headphone. But creative is planing to realease their own headphones with the super x-fi tech build in in future. Yes i am a bit sceptic as well, but remembering the good old Direct 3D Sound days, which were pretty amazing, and that makes me pretty confident that it is going to be amazing too.
Realiser A16 OOTH experience is getting all the rave. Pricey though at $2500 but I guess if you want the best implementation of a 3D experience which includes frontal sound representation which according to the video is hard to do then you have to pay for it.
yeah we know. in all honesty, will you stop acting like a d-bag and stop crapping in every thread that mentions creative? go get some fresh air or something.
I really wish Atmos was used more, but I know I am in the minority. I really, really love "home cinema" gaming and the few games I have heard on my 5.2.2 setup sound incredible. Spatial audio is the bees knees when implemented correctly. Luckily there is upmixing (Dolby Surround and Nueral X) for non Atmos or DTS:X content which does a pretty good job of putting the appropriate sounds in the height channels and really opens up the sound stage. If I never put my pc on my theater setup, I would have never even tried Atmos except for on movies and console games. Atmos on GoW4 on the XboneX sounds damn good. I am very interested in that Creative Super X-fi thing, hope it turns out nice. I would love that for late night gaming so I dont have to lose out on immersive audio. Hopefully it does not cost an arm and a leg but then again, ive spent a ton on audio so whats a couple hundred more right guys?
That Super XFI demo looks awesome but I would be concerned about industry adaptation. Look at 3D gaming on HDTV which died and if VR does not pickup, I think 3D audio will be pushed back again. I thought AMD TrueAudio was going to be built into Steam Audio? Nvidia VR Audio does not interests me because it seems it is so difficult for them to work outside of their own ecosystem. They won't let it work on AMD HW for example so that would suck on consoles and would be segmenting the market again. There are times when politics just screws up the market. I would PAY for a true universal game/movie/vr/ar standard... just get it done on HDTV, consoles and PC so we can have excellent 3D audio all the time for games like movies.
