OpenAL with Nvidia MCP-T

[zajelo3]

Hi all,
Can anyone tell me if the Linux Nvidia nforce2 drivers (ver. 0261) work correctly while using OpenAL? What I mean is, do they offload the audio processing to the MCP? Or is there some adjustments needed to get this to work correctly. I've been using OpenAL while playing UT2004 and I'm trying to keep as much of the workload off the CPU as possible.


TIA
Rick B

[Thunderbird]

At the moment the audio drivers for the nforce suck. Both oss and alsa drivers use just the onboard codec and not the MCP. Because of this all real work is done by your cpu.

As you know OpenAL is a nice crossplatform 3d audio api. It can do its work in software but it can also let the soundcard do the work. On windows some cards have native OpenAL support, cards that don't have support are handled using directsound or eax. On Linux there's no native OpenAL support. OpenAL is used to do the sound calculations and then the rest of the work is handled by oss or alsa. For the moment you are stuck to software 3d, the situation might change in the future.