There’s more to Vista than Flip3D

I just finished reading Windows Vista: more than just a pretty face, the first part of ars technica’s Vista review. It’s a very interesting article if you’re curious about why Vista really took so long to complete and what it offers beyond semi-transparent window borders.

I was disappointed that the author didn’t seem to realize the implications of the new audio framework in the last part of the article about the sound changes. By eliminating DirectSound (except through software emulation) and moving audio effect processing onto the CPU, Vista’s almost completely wiped out any reason to purchase an expensive Creative sound card. None of the features you’ll read about on the box will work under Vista since the CPU is doing all the audio processing and simply sending the sound to the card at last minute to deliver to the speakers.

Creative’s reacted with their “ALchemy” project, which attempts to translate all the DirectSound calls into OpenAL calls under Vista to restore hardware acceleration, but I don’t think that’s going to keep their cards selling once more people realize they don’t need them. Sending all the data back and forth over the PCI bus so that the sound card can do the effects processing is actually slower than keeping the work on the CPU.

Maybe it’ll be mentioned in the next part of the review.