Windows vista - sound engine problems

Under Windows Vista, the GW game engine does not currently support hardware acceleration, instead rendering all sound in software. I have tested using the -mute option, and the CPU sound rendering is costing me 5-6fps. Is ANet planning to implement the sound engine in such a way that it will support hardware sound under Vista?

DirectSound 3D Hardware support no longer works with Windows Vista. Microsoft removed the audio hardware layer to make the kernel more robust and stable. DirectSound 3D still works but only through the Vista sound engine software mixer. When the devs decide to support OpenAL then you should see audio hardware acceleration return to the game under Windows Vista. You can read more about it at http://www.openal.org/openal_vista.html.

That's what I meant; now that the audio stack runs at user level, applications can no longer access the hardware directly. My question was, how long until the devs get OpenAL support in the game? Is it even going to happen?

Well, hopefully someone from ArenaNet can chime in on here and let us know if GW2 will support it. I don't think GWEN will be anytime soon since it is based on the original engine. However, they may be able to patch it later on if resources are available to continue developing the original game in the future.

If you're using a Creative sound card you may be able to get DirectSound3D hardware acceleration working in Vista. Creative's released a software called "Creative ALchemy" that acts as a fake DirectSound3D driver, wrapping DirectSound3D calls (including EAX stuff) into OpenAL. It should work with Sound Blaster Audigy and X-Fi cards, and Guild Wars is on its supported games list.

I have no idea about the performance as I don't have one of these cards but nobody seeking ultimate performance should be using Vista at the moment anyway.

I have already tried to use the ALchemy for my x-Fi, and it causes the game to crash whenever it is opened on default settings. For anyone else experiencing this problem, the easiest solution is to run Guild Wars as an administrator.

Thanks for your help. I'll try oc-ing my CPU and graphics card and see if that helps any.