If you’ve invested your hard earned cash on a Creative X-FI sound card and a copy of Vista, you may be feeling a bit underwhelmed right now. Some of your games may be sounding a bit flat and lifeless and you’ll have no doubt felt that sinking feeling when you edit the sound settings in your new game only to find that you can’t enable some of the fancy options. There is a good reason for this and you probably will have been told at great length about it by one of the many passengers on the anti-Microsoftbandwagon.

The Science…

If you’re an experienced PC gamer you’ll no doubt be aware of DirectX and the various functions that make up the DirectX standard, such as DirectDraw, Direct3d andDirectSound and DirectSound3D. You will probably be aware of the hype surrounding Direct3d already, given that it has now reached version 10, but that’s a story for another day. DirectSound is what we are interested in here and it is sadly missing in Vista. XP and DirectX9 featured a “Hardware Abstraction Layer” which was a piece of software that allowed Windows to talk directly to a soundcard such as the X-FI to provide hardware mixing and 3d effects for your games. Without this layer any sound you hear will be mixedusing software, rendering much of your shiny new soundcard useless.

The Relief…

Fortunately, directsound was already starting to disappear over time in favour of “OpenAL”, which was originally developed to allow Windows games to be ported to other formats such as Linux, OSX and even the PS3 and Xbox 360. To the listener any difference between the two formats is extremely difficult to detect so you’re not going to miss anything on a lot of newer games like Battlefield 2, Battlefield 2142, Call of Juarez, S.T.A.L.K.E.R, Quake 4 etc, but it does leave us with a problem when trying to play games that use DirectSound. Games like Half Life 2, Far Cry, Call of Duty 2 and F.E.A.R. will not let you enable hardware mixing and will therefore sound a bit empty.