Creative Alchemy results!

[nekrosoft13]

Ok, well 4 days ago i replaced by Audigy 2 with X-Fi, just for the reason of Vista drop of DirectSound HAL.

for past few days I have been testing all games I have currently Installed. For a beta wrapper results are amazing.

ok, here we go :)

Call of Juarez: alchemy not required, native OpenAL

Company of Heroes: no noticeble difference

FEAR: EAX, hardware acceleration fully restored, minor improvement in FPS

FEAR XP: EAX, hardware acceleration fully restored, minor improvement in FPS, needs more work, few minor errors in log
DirectSoundBuffer[2407]::ServiceStream at 180941 : Re-starting Source
DirectSoundBuffer[2947]::ServiceStream at 198586 : Re-starting Source
DirectSoundBuffer[3085]::ServiceStream at 200746 : Re-starting Source
DirectSoundBuffer[4749]::ServiceStream ERROR at 308425 : Queue Starved of Buffers

Flatout2: Alchemy doesn't work
Failed to load and initialize ct_oal.dll, falling back to dsound.dll

GT Legends: fully restored, need to adjust number of buffers, still looking for magic number

GTR2: fully restored, need to adjust number of buffers, still looking for magic number

Guild Wars: fully restored (EAX, hardware acceleration)

Hitman Blood Money: fully restored, huge increase in FPS (about double)

Infernal Demo: fully restored, minor increase in FPS

Neverwinter Nights: fully restored, decent increase in FPS

Neverwinter Nights 2: works for some, for me doesn't (had 3 BSOD trying to get it to work)

Scarface: can't test because of graphical corruption

Simcity 4: increase in FPS to playable levels

Titan Quest: fully restored

Rainbow Six Las Vegas: fully restored, minor increase in FPS, still needs work
DirectSoundBuffer[92]::ServiceStream at 113916 : Re-starting Source

Splinter Cell Chaos Theory: fully restored

Splinter Cell Double Agent: fully restored

Tomb Raider Legend(updated 2-3-07): restored, need to use following settings
Buffers=8
Duration=20
DisableDirectMusic=False
MaxVoiceCount=128

Unreal Tournament 2004 (32bit): fully restored

Unreal Tournament 2004 (64bit): native OpenAL

Act of War Direct Action: fully restored

Act of War High Treason: fully restored

Battlefield 2: native OpenAL

Black & White 2: Alchemy results in application crash

Black & White 2 Battle of Gods: Alchemy results in application crash

Call of Duty 2(updated 2-3-07): fully restored

Colin McRae Rally 2005: fully restored (EAX, hardware accleration)

Crashday: not tested yet

Dark Messiah: not tested yet

Deus Ex Invisible War: game is a mess, will need some work to get it to work

Fable: fully restored

Gothic III: can't test, game causes BSOD or driver errors

Need for Speed Most Wanted: not tested yet

Need for Speed Carbon(updated 2-2-07): alchemy causes BSOD on my system

Oblivion: not tested yet

Civilization 4: not tested yet

Civilization 4 Warlords: not tested yet

Sid Meier Pirates!: fully restored

Test Drive Unlimited: alchemy doesn't work for some reason

Toca Race Driver 3 (updated 2-2-07): Full Restored (EAX, Hardware Acceleration)
Need to use following settings, other wise will result in corrupted sound
Buffers=8
Duration=7
DisableDirectMusic=False
MaxVoiceCount=128

I will report back, with more, feel free to add your results

[crainger]

Nice one. This will come in handy when I Visterise.

[nekrosoft13]

4 updates so far ;)

[jAkUp]

Nice, I am getting really, really good results in FEAR, I am very impressed with this little utility!

[Bman212121]

Nice, I am getting really, really good results in FEAR, I am very impressed with this little utility!

Where is that guy at???? I'd like to get my hands on it as well. :D

Sounds really sweet. It means I'll actually have been sound support than I did on Xp 64 bit. There were a few games it would not let you run hardware accel, and I couldn't get it to work. (BF2 instantely comes to mind, but we all know that game has a few issues in itself. ;) )

[slaWter]

Thanks man, very useful list!

[CaptNKILL]

Great list. :)

I tested it with Oblivion the other day and the game crashed when I loaded a saved game. Its possible that I just did something wrong though so you'll probably want to test it yourself. :)

... though I don't really know how many areas there are in this game that use EAX effects. I imagine the performance increase is pretty substantial though in some cases where the game is extremely CPU limited.

[ArrowMk84]

Medieval 2 runs great with Alchemy. No different than playing on XP.

Edit: NWN2 and Titan Quest also run great with Alchemy.

[nekrosoft13]

arrow, how did you get NWN2 work? while trying to get alchemy to work, i got BSOD 3 times in a row

[ArrowMk84]

arrow, how did you get NWN2 work? while trying to get alchemy to work, i got BSOD 3 times in a row

I just downloaded the Alchemy program and ran it. It detected which games it could autopatch, which includes NWN2. I just had to select the games I wanted to patch and clicked "transmute". I haven't tried any of the manual patching.

Also, I did this after updating the game to the latest version.

[ATI_Dude]

Deus Ex Invisible War: game is a mess, will need some work to get it to work

The game didn't support DS3D out of the box. An unofficial hack (http://www.bockholdt.com/dsc/faq.html) was needed to activate hardware 3D sound.

[nekrosoft13]

The game didn't support DS3D out of the box. An unofficial hack (http://www.bockholdt.com/dsc/faq.html) was needed to activate hardware 3D sound.

thanks, i still need to fix the game before trying that.

[ynnek]

Eewww!! BSOD's in Vista?!?! Microsoft did all that work to make sure that would never happen with the new driver model, espsecially for stuff thats not core, like sound.... Someone (MS or Creative) messed up..

[RAY16]

The original Deus Ex gets the "couldn't load ct_oal.dll, falling back to dsound.dll" error.

[ATI_Dude]

The original Deus Ex gets the "couldn't load ct_oal.dll, falling back to dsound.dll" error.

A couple of things to try:

1. Make sure the game doesn't try to force Aureal 3D instead of EAX. Look for settings in deusex.ini and disable any A3D settings.

2. Set number of 3D buffers to 16 (or 4) in the dsound.ini file

3. Look for any sound related latency/duration entries in deusex.ini. Make sure the settings are the same in dsound.ini

[nekrosoft13]

i'm still playing around with buffer and latency settings, creative should give better doc, to figure out what tittle needs what.

[DRen72]

...Splinter Cell Double Agent: fully restored


How did you get it working under Double Agent? I picked up an X-Fi Gamer over the weekend and installed it using the beta drivers from Creative. Then I installed Double Agent, patched it to 1.01, then ran the Creative Alchemy program. Alchemy did not detect that I had even installed Double Agent. What am I missing here?

[nekrosoft13]

alchemy program doesn't detect all games, if it does not get detected. go into game directory, go into offline folder find the main executable which i believe is splintercell4.exe and copy the dsound.dll and dsound.inf files from alchemy folder.

[ATI_Dude]

i'm still playing around with buffer and latency settings, creative should give better doc, to figure out what tittle needs what.

I see.

It could be a general problem with the Unreal Engine which uses a proprietary sound subsystem. Have you tried other Unreal Engine games such as UT or Clive Barker's Undying?

Unfortunately I cannot contribute with any testing since I'm staying away from Vista until it matures.

Good luck and keep us updated!

[nekrosoft13]

i wasn't talking about unreal engine, i was talking in general.

[ATI_Dude]

i wasn't talking about unreal engine, i was talking in general.

Ok

[DRen72]

Ok, I go this figured out thanks to you guys. It pretty easy actually and it seems to work very well.

[slaWter]

Test Drive Unlimited: alchemy doesn't work for some reason


Do you still remember what the problem was?

ALchemy crashes for me after 1-2min with the final version of TDU. The beta didn't had that problem if I remember correctly.

[nekrosoft13]

Do you still remember what the problem was?

ALchemy crashes for me after 1-2min with the final version of TDU. The beta didn't had that problem if I remember correctly.

alchemy simply made no difference for me, and for some reaon caused TDU to crash once or twice

i need to get the game to mess around with alchemy again

[slaWter]

Ok. I used ALchemy for the TDU beta and it didn't crash for me, unlike the retail version.