Overon:
Exactly my point about the EAX. As I said, the early EAX were opened up because of competition with A3d. Since Creative bought them out to kill them, they haven't had any more open specs for EAX, and all of the later EAX are indeed closed and proprietary as both you and I have mentioned.

BTW, I did mention facts regarding vista and direct sound. If you disagree with any of my facts please let me know, and we can discuss it.

Fact 1)
Microsoft shafted creative (which I'm fine with) and gamers (which I'm not) by ELIMINATING all hardware directx directsound support from vista. The software emulation for directsound in vista supports ONLY STEREO, not surround.
MS instead went to something in Vista called XACT.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XACT
There are other names involved too, like UAA, etc, but the XACT is the part that is most interesting to me. The X in XACT stands for cross platform, and guess what other main platform its used on? Xbox! XACT is also part of the XNA game studio.
So from the surface to a cynical person like me, it looks like MS did the vista audio change so they could save a few bucks when porting old xbox games (like the years old xbox 1 halo 2 game they made vista only) to vista.

Fact 2)
Creative (fortunately for them) started using OpenAL before vista came out, this was an interface to thier hardware. The first game I rememeber with it (not nessasarily the first game that used it) was a battlefield game, BF2 I belive.
Since then, many games use OpenAL, perhaps even all the recent ones.
Here's a list of OpenAL games:
http://www.openal.org/titles.html

Fact 3)
OpenAL is supported in the new Vista sound thing using HARDWARE in creative cards, so any game that supports OpenAL can still use hardware acceleration in vista.

Fact 4)
Creative made something called Alechemy that uses the OpenAL interface to convert Directsound calls to OpenAL and the new vista format. So old games will hopefully be able to use hardware acceleration and full surround sound (instead of the stereo that vista forces software emulation of directsound to use).
Here's the list of games that alchemy supports:
http://connect.creativelabs.com/alchemy/Lists/Games/AllItems.aspx
If it says verified its been tested by creative, otherwise it hasn't. No steam games (half life, counter strike, etc) are shown as verified.
Note that they list steam games under SOURCE ENGINE, despite the fact that hl1, and CS, and DoD, etc are not source engine games. CS:S, hl2, DoD:S, etc are the source engine games.
If the game you'd like to play isn't verified, you may just have to hope for the best. The stereo only software emulation of directsound in vista (when alchemy doesn't support a game) is only one issue. Other sound issues exist with older games and vista as well.

Fact 5)
If all you do is play the latest greatest eye candy games, you probably DONT CARE about directsound, and you probably have vista for dx10, and you can ignore all this. The latest greatest eye candy titles are likely to be OpenAL now rather than directsound.

Fact 6)
Creative has finally worked up thier drivers in vista (took them quite a while, despite MS giving manufactures like creative much extra time before retail release of vista, like how OEM copies were sold on new computers months in advance of vista retail release) to where most people don't have have issues with creative so most people won't have experianced any issues, especially if they only play the latest greatest eye candy stuff.

Is that enough facts for you Overon?

This comment was edited on Mar 25, 18:01.