Software sound?!

[Dave-ros]

I've been looking up the solution here to get surround sound working in Gears of War, but during my travels, I discovered something weird in my log files:

Init: ALAudio device opened: Generic Hardware
Init: AL_VENDOR : Creative Labs Inc.
Init: AL_RENDERER : Software
Init: AL_VERSION : 1.1
Init: AL_EXTENSIONS : EAX EAX2.0 EAX3.0 EAX4.0 EAX5.0 EAX3.0EMULATED EAX4.0EMULATED AL_EXT_OFFSET AL_EXT_LINEAR_DISTANCE AL_EXT_EXPONENT_DISTANCE
Init: ALAudioDevice initialized.
So since when is my Creative X-Fi Xtreme Audio "software"? Do I have a hardware problem, or is the game just not reporting the hardware that it's using? Earlier logs from the past few days indicate that this was happening even before I began amending WarEngineUserSettings.ini (as a part of activating surround sound).

I should point out that I'm not having any sound issues (though sometimes after playing, system sounds are strangely muffled -- possibly an EAX effect issue resulting from crashes?), and indeed surround sound now works! The "Voice" section in the game's "Guide" reports my sound card properly. I have the latest drivers for my card, and have installed the latest version of OpenAL (though again, this was happening before that). I had an Audigy 2 when I first installed the game, however...

[Frag Maniac]

I think it has to do specifically with cards that don't support hardware OpenAL, which is the case with my M-Audio. I use the My Documents WarEngineUserSettings.ini tweak that has been mentioned here whereby you set the OpenAL part of it like this...

[ALAudio.ALAudioDevice]
UseEffectsProcessing=False
DeviceName=

...since then I have been getting surround sound just fine.

[Dave-ros]

Yeah, I get surround sound, it's just weird that the log file says I've got software sound -- is my sound hardware going to waste, or is it just reporting wrong?

[Frag Maniac]

Don't know Dave, personally I avoid Creative sound cards like the plague, nor do I believe the hype that they are less resource hungry as I've seen specs of how much resources they use overall. Love my Creative Gigaworks speakers though.

[toiletduk]

If you're using Vista, all sound is software.

[Frag Maniac]

Yeah that's one of the things about Vista I don't like, they screwed with the audio codecs and it has a crappy sim surround instead of real 5.1. I thought it was just for stuff like HDTV broadcasts using TV tuner cards, but maybe not. I hope MS pulled their heads out of their arses with Windows 7 because it's either Vista or that once they go 64 bit exclusive.

[Dave-ros]

I'm on WinXP though... oh well, I guess it's just "one of those things" -- at least I've got a Quad Core, so software sound shouldn't be too much of a resource hog :p

[Frag Maniac]

Like I said Dave, I've seen tests that put those less resource hungry claims to shame when it comes to Creative cards. Most of the good quality sound cards use software driven sound now. It could just be that your model of Creative card does not support the res at which GoW sound is sampled at, so it defaults to software. Or that hardware sound decoding only works on HD audio gear.