I remember turning stuff like EAX on when I played Thief and it simply sounded like reverb was added to everything. I did like my Sound Blasters from back in the day though. You definitely needed those then. But today? On-board audio is truly more than good enough. There's no reason to get a sound card now unless you want some kind of specialized input or output.
Environmental effects included things like occlusion, not just reverb. Even just properly tuned reverb can add a
lot to a scene though - and it's something that many games were missing once people stopped using sound cards.
EAX did start out basic, but got pretty good toward the end. EAX 5.0 supported 128 objects with four effects each.
I think many people may not have configured it properly though, as I remember the drivers allowing you to do things such as enabling reverb on all audio system-wide.
The X-Fi's CMSS-3D technology still produces some of the best directional audio I've heard in games.
Maybe their HRTF just works particularly well for me, but I get
really good directionality from it - and it produces 3D sound from basically any game using DirectSound3D HW.
F.E.A.R. always stood out to me as having amazing directional audio if you were using headphones and CMSS-3D, and it used EAX 4.0 for environmental effects.
I'm not sure how well it demos in a video for someone that's not actually playing the game:
Yeah I've experienced some of those. Unfortunately I've usually found them underwhelming, especially when they attempt to make it sound like there's something behind me. Maybe it's something with my hearing.
It could be that you're an outlier and don't fit any of the standard HRTFs. I'd be interested to see what you think of the CMSS-3D examples above.
Note: you
must use stereo headphones - and it probably makes a difference if you're using in/on/over-ear headphones too.
How come nobody seems to care about audio processing in PC games these days? I remember when tech like this was popping up all the time for PCs back when discrete sound cards were popular. Now almost everyone just acts like onboard/video card audio is "good enough" and at most will just buy a high-quality DAC to plug in for headphones. I had come to the conclusion that past a certain point gamers just didn't care if sound was any better or not. I wonder if that's still true.
Microsoft removed DirectSound3D's hardware acceleration support with Windows Vista due to a new audio driver model - which is what was required for things like multichannel audio, 3D audio, and EAX effects in old games.
People seemed to think that this meant your old sound card didn't work any more, but Creative released the ALchemy software which translated those old DirectSound3D HW calls to OpenAL so they continued to work - and still do work even on Windows 10. Nearly every game I've tested still works if you have an X-Fi sound card installed.
That was combined with on-board audio becoming commonplace, and CPUs now being fast enough to handle things like multichannel audio without requiring dedicated hardware any more. Game audio design has improved a lot, but many games actually still don't do things like occlusion, and can't support long reverbs - because those can still be computationally expensive when you aren't using dedicated hardware.
www.dolby.com
