On Tue, Jul 13, 2010 at 09:31, James_Huk <wineforum-user@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Thanks for the answers. > > It seams that OpenAL is the way to go (even for PulseAudio it would seam - as there is a backend for it in newer OpenAL releases). > > One thing though - there are very few sound cards that support OpenAL hardware acceleration (as far as I know that would be Creative X-Fi, Asus Xonar (here I am not sure), Razer Barracuda (again - not sure about this) and probably some other professional cards - EMU Series fox example) and none of this have any HW acceleration on Linux. And at least Creative products have driver issues on Windows systems (especially Vista and above), so I wouldn't count this will be ported to Linux/*BSD/Solaris at all, although at one point Creative stated that they are planning to support hardware acceleration on X-fi cards, through OpenAL... but this was few years back - now they got financial problems so I don't think this is ever going to happen, and even if it would - how many users have those (rather expensive) cards? 5%, maybe 10%? And there is a reason for that - I myself was a "fan" of cards with HardwareMixing (well dmix wasn't working at all back then) and Hardware accelerated 3D sound, I have quite a few "high-end" products of its time (SoundBlaster AWE64, Live! 5.1, Live! 7.1 and Aureal Vortex au882x), but since CPU power increased there is very little difference in sound quality (if any) between integrated Realtek "HDA" and expensive X-Fi (on normal speakers or headphones - I don't know about 10000 dollars stuff - but again, how many users have such expensive setup?), so most users don't buy these expensive cards. In other words - I wouldn't count on Hardware Accelerated OpenAL in near future (if it ever going to happen for Integrated devices at all...) If HW acceleration is only needed for such a niche market, you probably shouldn't expect any OpenAL acceleration before Doomsday...
