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Quote: " The root of all these problems? Microsoft's Windows team made the bold decision to rewrite the Vista audio stack from the ground up, and in doing so they removed hardware acceleration for DirectSound. That's right. They took hardware support away from the most ubiquitous sound API implemented in games over the past several years."

Quote: "Are you guys really buying this crap?
Some actually think that software based sound is better than hardware accelerated sound?

If you really think that, you must not have been around ten years ago, or if you were you were not too PC literate.
How many simultaneous sounds do you think you will be able to have in future games before the sound gets distorted or the performance hit exceeds 20%?

I was looking forward to better games and environments with the CPU cycles, not sound taking 10% - 20% at highest cpu priority hurting gaming performance considerably.

Onboard sound already has a huge performance hit and screws up many games, now people think total software sound is good???
Those numbers of 1 - 2% hit are a sham, their will be much more CPU hit beyond that. Just when 5.1 surround was really getting somewhere, they set us back 5 years. Idiots. They should have made a better API but obviously couldn't pull it off. Directsound sucked hard, developers would agree there, now that is the real truth. Microsoft is pushing the Xact sound engine to PC developers because it happens to be the xbox proprietary sound engine (gee not for cross platforming games or anything?), and my recent testing with that shows alot of overhead hurting over FPS in games alot!

Next Microsoft will do you the service of removing hardware accelerated video, to give you the gift of software based 3D.
What a freaking lie.

Thank you very much. "

Quote: "
In order to appropriately protect content, Vista will probably have to disable any special device features that it can't directly control. For example many sound cards built on C-Media chipsets (which in practice is the vast majority of them) support Steinberg's ASIO (Audio Stream I/O), a digital audio interface that completely bypasses the Windows audio mixer and other audio-related driver software to provide more flexibility and much lower latency than the Windows ones. ASIO support is standard for newer C-Media hardware like the CMI 8788. Since ASIO bypasses Windows' audio handling, it would probably have to be disabled, which is problematic because audiophiles and professional musicians require ASIO support specifically because of its much higher quality than the standard Windows channels (you can get more information on Vista's audio architecture and the changes from XP in this post from Creative Labs)."

Quote: "
Introduction

This document looks purely at the cost of the technical portions of Vista's content protection [Note B]. The political issues (under the heading of DRM) have been examined in exhaustive detail elsewhere and won't be commented on further, unless it's relevant to the cost analysis. However, one important point that must be kept in mind when reading this document is that in order to work, Vista's content protection must be able to violate the laws of physics, something that's unlikely to happen no matter how much the content industry wishes that it were possible [Note C]. This conundrum is displayed over and over again in the Windows content-protection requirements, with manufacturers being given no hard-and-fast guidelines but instead being instructed that they need to display as much dedication as possible to the party line. The documentation is peppered with sentences like:

“It is recommended that a graphics manufacturer go beyond the strict letter of the specification and provide additional content-protection features, because this demonstrates their strong intent to protect premium content”.

This is an exceedingly strange way to write technical specifications, but is dictated by the fact that what the spec is trying to achieve is fundamentally impossible. Readers should keep this requirement to display appropriate levels of dedication in mind when reading the following analysis {snip}

Note C:
Note C: In order for content to be displayed to users, it has to be copied numerous times. For example if you're reading this document on the web then it's been copied from the web server's disk drive to server memory, copied to the server's network buffers, copied across the Internet, copied to your PC's network buffers, copied into main memory, copied to your browser's disk cache, copied to the browser's rendering engine, copied to the render/screen cache, and finally copied to your screen. If you've printed it out to read, several further rounds of copying have occurred. Windows Vista's content protection (and DRM in general) assume that all of this copying can occur without any copying actually occurring, since the whole intent of DRM is to prevent copying. If you're not versed in DRM doublethink this concept gets quite tricky to explain, but in terms of quantum mechanics the content enters a superposition of simultaneously copied and uncopied states until a user collapses its wave function by observing the content (in physics this is called quantum indeterminacy or the observer's paradox). Depending on whether you follow the Copenhagen or many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, things then either get weird or very weird. So in order for Windows Vista's content protection to work, it has to be able to violate the laws of physics and create numerous copies that are simultaneously not copies.

(Someone has pointed out that Microsoft is trying to implement a quantum encryption channel in software that attempts to make premium content non- observable, detecting problem states and discontinuing transmission if any are observed).
"