Sound Hardware Acceleration?

[giorgygr 61]

There will be support for non-built-in Sound card owners?

I remember in ARMA1 we had the option to enable/disable Hardware Acceleration..

In ARMA2 i think (maybe i m mistaken) support had dropped

What about ARMA3?

Sound Hardware Acceleration would be really beneficial (performance wise) for Sound Card owners..

[Leon86 13]

not happening I think. doesnt take much cpu time these days and most people dont have these cards.

no modern games us it afaik.

[giorgygr 61]

not happening I think. doesnt take much cpu time these days and most people dont have these cards.

no modern games us it afaik.

*Hmm..

I was thinking the opposite in a scenario with lots units fighting simultaneously.

I believe it's pity for the CPU to raise all the load of Sound (and it also leads to 'Console-ization' of PC's)

"Why would you send the Plumber to do the work of Electrician?"

..but anyways thanks :)

[Panda_pl 0]

By not using a dedicated device you prevent potential driver issues. It's just one less thing the authors need to worry about when making their game stable and one less hardware combination to test.

CPU cores running idle or half-idle when gaming is a common occurrence and mixing sound tracks is relatively cheap task so there is no reason not to do it, at least on multi-core systems. I believe consoles do not have a dedicated sound subsystem for similar reasons and modern day libraries are probably best fit for using the CPU.

[metalcraze 290]

That was Creative cards only stuff and hardware acceleration and EAX never worked well in series. As Marek (or Suma - don't remember exactly) said that they never could get it to work right because of Creative drivers where for every 2nd player it didn't work right.

Unfortunately it didn't work right for me either (popping and crackling sound in OFP whenever HW acceleration was turned on, but sometimes it worked - guess Creative drivers are dependent on positions of planets or something)

[MavericK96 0]

Yeah, as others have said there's really no soundcard-specific optimizations like EAX in games anymore, since the switch to OpenAL.

That said, I REALLY hope there is proper directional sound in ArmA 3. It has always been kind of iffy in ArmA 2.

[ahmedjbh 0]

Sounds need a lot of work, even bf1942 had better sound engine.

You just cant process the raw sound anymore, that doesnt cut it.

[brightcandle 114]

I have gone through a few different setups for sound for arma 3. My favourite so far is using a SBX Pro on a Soundblaster ZX with 5.1 surround sound which then SBX adjusts to my headphones. That gives me about the best sense of direction in A3 and other games compared to Dolby Headphone with a Xonar and especially compared to the onboard solution or no surround enhancement at all.

While we can't get hardware acceleration that doesn't make a sound card useless. The lower sound floor and the surround implementations that take 5.1/7.1 output from the game and then generate output to the headphones is better than just game to headphones directly except in a very small number of games.

[karamasfer 10]

when i try to join to some servers i cant get the loading mission files part it directly enters to server like it already has it downloaded. i get in the server i hear people talking for a second then i get no message received (all game stops responding) some servers work fine. please help me. i asked suppport to help me they didnt help me so i guess i will ask for help here?

note: help me so i can get out of this place full of people who reported this particular post. special jimmy thinks this place is national g20 meeting...

Edited November 23, 2014 by karamasfer

[roshnak 41]

when i try to join to some servers i cant get the loading mission files part it directly enters to server like it already has it downloaded. i get in the server i hear people talking for a second then i get no message received (all game stops responding) some servers work fine. please help me. i asked suppport to help me they didnt help me so i guess i will ask for help here?

note: help me so i can get out of this place full of people who reported this particular post. special jimmy thinks this place is national g20 meeting...

There is a whole subforum for you to ask these kinds of questions. Maybe try asking there.

While we can't get hardware acceleration that doesn't make a sound card useless. The lower sound floor and the surround implementations that take 5.1/7.1 output from the game and then generate output to the headphones is better than just game to headphones directly except in a very small number of games.

Which just makes me wish that Arma 3 had proper sound spatialization.

[ratszo 17]

I.m using 'Razer Surround' driver/software thru my cheapo wallmart headphones.

This explains how the software works:

Comes with an 8-band graphic EQ.

Razer mouse owners have the software in the mouse suite.

Bit of a hassle signing up to the cloud, but once installed, can go 'off-line' no problem.

[roshnak 41]

Yeah, Razer Surround is okay. One of the problems with it and also things like Dolby Headphone and CMSS-3D/whatever Creative's new thing is called, though, is that they have trouble with elevation. I think older Arma games used OpenAL, which had some custom drivers that supported HRTFs for proper sound spatialization. I'm not really sure why they dropped it.

Either way, anything is better than the really jarring effect of having guns being fired to your right only played in the right headphone speaker.

Edited November 25, 2014 by roshnak

[almanzo 144]

I thought that the way windows now handles sound and sound drivers that hardware accelerated sound is a thing of the past?

From a users perspective, there is a huge difference between how Windows XP handled sounds and how windows have handled sounds since Win Vista.

For instance, as I am a user of Creative Soundblaster ZS platinium 2 PRO (a sound card that is decades old, but still better than onboard) and back in Win XP, I was able to do a simple SPDIF pass through in order to send unaltered sounds to my reciever. In that way, my reciever could be responsible for decoding the signal, while Windows now adays only lets you send an allready decoded signal to a reciever.

It's still possible to do SPDIF passthrough from what I've learned, but only on an application level, for instance, some DVD software allows SPDIF passthrough, but it's dependant on software.

I have a feeling that this is the result of the new copyright systems built into modern versions of Windows, but I am not entirely sure. From what I know, no games developer have Dolby or DTS encoded sounds that can be decoded externally, to be frank it's been ages since I've seen a single title adverticed to be Dolby or DTS ready, but I might be wrong.

This is purely speculation though, as my knowlege or expertise in this area is quite limited. However, I thought I'd bring it up in order for other, more knowlegable people to further explain or unveil the current state of sound technology.

What I do know though, is that soundcards and the development of sound card hardware has stagnated. My card is over a decade old, but it still outperforms most onboard sound cards. It's not that well isolated, so I do recieve some crackling based on what the computer is working on, but nontheless it's still capable of more than most other cards. 24bit 192000 hz has been the highest quality available to my knowlege for over 10 years.

For those of us who care about sound, it's actually quite a sad period. The ability to rent a blueray or even DVD is becomming more and more difficult, and the marked is more and more dominated by streaming and on demand services. Those are great and all, and the picture quality and resolution is quite good... However, very few movies are available with sorround sound, and when it does, it's with Dolby Digital PLUSS, that only supports 5.1 sound, while most bluerays today are shipped with Dolby TrueHD or at least Dolby Digital SoundEx.

[StarThornberry 10]

There are some new Sound mods that are really good that really improve on the sounds of vanilla, I wish that dedicated support was included as well though :(