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Asus releases EAX drivers for Xonar D2

by on13 December 2007
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Hardware acceleration for Vista

It appears that Creative isn't the only company that has worked on solving the hardware acceleration issues under Windows Vista, as Asus has just announced that it has released a new driver for its Xonar D2, D2X and U1 sound cards that adds EAX among its features.

Asus has implemented something called DirectSound 3D Game Extensions 1.0, or DS3D GX 1.0 for short, which adds hardware acceleration for sound cards in Windows Vista. It works much like Creative's Alchemy technology, as it's a wrapper that takes the DirectSound3D instructions and turns them into hardware accelerated instructions, or EAX instructions.

Asus claims that it makes OpenAL redundant, but we can't agree with them here, as OpenAL has a lot more to offer in the long term. Nonetheless, it's nice to see that Asus has made an effort to offer hardware accelerated gaming under Windows Vista, but at the moment it seems like the list of games is somewhat limited.

The press release covers 30 games in total, but other games might still work, and more verified games are to follow, according to Asus. Some of the games are quite old and some titles are quite strange, and we haven't even heard of some of the games, but at least some new titles like Crysis are on the list.

You can find the press release and the full list of games here
Last modified on 14 December 2007
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