[geeks] Best Vista story I've seen

[Francois Dion]

On 2/20/07, Charles Shannon Hendrix <shannon at widomaker.com> wrote:
> Miles 2D (the primary wave mixing 3D API) is nice if that's all your hardware
> will support, but it is nothing like full EAX support.

I was pointing out in fact how GUS demos would kick the behind of
software mixing demos, hence *everybody* added direct GUS hardware
support to their demo. I was in the demo scene eons ago, and having a
GUS was just like having a second CPU, since a full tracker on a 486
would take half the CPU. In comparison to PC speed now, hardware
acceleration of sound might buy you 10-15% sustainable "free" cpu, not
75%+, so

I also was in that industry and already by 1997, software vendors just
wanted a canned DAT tape with the music (or CD or whatever). They
didn't want to spend any money either. I was arguing that using a
tracker type engine or a midi engine would be better since you could
do interactive music, but almost no publisher cared.

Now they want a bunch of mp3 so they can have more variety. Of course,
the actual score is not altered in real time based on the action, at
least in my experience playing recent games (The Sims, AD1701 etc). At
best, they change tracks to alter the mood.

> > the music is all CD audio. That's a shame because the
> > music is no longer interactive. If all you are doing is mixing a few
> > sound effects, there is no need for hardware mixing, that is just
> > trivial to do.
>
> Trivial, but subject to latency penalties and game stuttering when your
> system is very busy, and it can't offer many features.

Not arguing that. Just pointing out that software companies dont
really care about this stuff. Just give them an interface and that's
it. If they cared about technology and extracting the max speed out of
the hardware, BeOS for example would have been a very popular platform
and Windows would never have gotten any games... :)

> In F.E.A.R., I got a 20% improvement in frame rate during sound-complex
> scenes, and wave mixing generally lost a ton of effects and there was a lot
> of clipping.  EAX 4.0.... smooth as butter and sounds great.

Yes, with the hardware buffers you can update your pcm queue much less
often, instead of having a thread interrupting at a high rate and
doing everything in software. Plus latency is easier to improve.

Francois