Is EAX natively supported in Windows 8?

[Kain]

Now that I've installed Windows 8 Pro, can I natively run EAX games will full support?

[Seyiji]

Now that I've installed Windows 8 Pro, can I natively run EAX games will full support?

EAX has been gone since Windows Vista. Last I checked it doesn't exist even if you have an EAX capable card.

Don't take my word as law though since i use onboard and haven't followed Creative since Vista

[Kain]

In Windows 7, EAX worked in Doom 3 for me without any mods/alterations. Even on the stock drivers for my sound card.

[t3hl33td4rg0n]

You'll probably want to grab Creative ALchemy to enable support for EAX enabled games using DirectSound.

Just run it and add the games that you want to play to the list. It adds a DLL and a few other files to enable EAX sound.

[sMashPiranha]

EAX works the same in 8 as it did in 7 and Vista. You'll need Alchemy for old stuff that needed Directsound3d, as above.

[koralis]

Hardware audio in Win8 doesn't mean the same as it did with Win98. Now it means an audio coprocessor/dsp. In other words, you get the same sound with or without hardware audio, what changes is who does the calculations.

[Loser-P]

Starting with Windows Vista hardware acceleration via direct sound was removed. So if a game used direct sound you would get stereo software emulation. In order to get full EAX/hardware accelerated sound in those games you would have to use Creative's ALchemy which intercepted direct sound api requests and translated them to openAL.

The few games that have been released in the last 5 years or so that use EAX do it via openAL so ALchemy isn't required for them.

[Argoon1981]

OpenAl unfortunately is also going the way of the dodo, is used less and less on games now, being replaced by FMOD that afaik has no hardware acceleration capabilities nor even true 3D sound, it has 3D sound mind you the problem is that on FMOD the directional sound is treated like this "this sounds comes from the left channel or any other channel and have this volume and FX", on OpenAL sound is treated like this " this sound has this xyz coordinate on the game world, it is being blocked, occluded or deflected by this geometry modify sound accordingly ".

Creative is to blame on the death of OpenAL they bought it made it closed source just to let it die and rot, their new sound cards don't even use true hardware acceleration what imo kills the purpose of using a sound card.

I most say tho that there's some forks of the OpenAL code before Creative bought it but they or aren't used at all in games or used only on a few, they are OpenALsoft and Rapture3D this last one is a closed commercial option used on the Dirt games, it has the benefit of using a real 3D sound system that works fantastically with headphones like the old A3D system from Aureal, neither have hardware acceleration unfortunately.