Restricted Notes by a Geek

Few weeks, or rather a month ago when I tested Windows Vista my biggest gripe with it was not all the new features, bloat and disk space usage, but the fact that Winamp couldn’t play songs smooth and uninterrupted while playing a game myself.

Vista features a completely re-written audio stack. Because of the architectural changes in the redesigned audio stack, a direct path from DirectSound to the audio drivers does not exist. DirectSound and other APIs such as MME are emulated as WASAPI Session instances. DirectSound runs in emulation mode on the Microsoft software mixer. The emulator does not have hardware abstraction, so there is no hardware DirectSound acceleration, meaning hardware and software relying on DirectSound acceleration may have degraded performance. It’s likely a supposed performance hit might not be noticeable, depending on the application and actual system hardware. In the case of hardware 3D audio effects played using DirectSound3D, they will not be playable.

Third-party APIs such as ASIO and OpenAL are not affected by these architectural changes in Windows Vista. A solution for applications that wish to take advantage of hardware accelerated high-quality 3D positional audio is to use OpenAL. However, this only works if the manufacturer provides an OpenAL driver for their hardware.

As of 2007, a solution to re-enable hardware acceleration of DirectSound3D and Audio Effects, such as EAX, called ‘Creative ALchemy’ was launched. Creative ALchemy intercepts calls to DirectSound3D and translates them into OpenAL calls to be processed by supported hardware such as Sound Blaster X-Fi and Sound Blaster Audigy.

This however also didn’t work out that good, in most cases it does work but for the gamer trying to listen to music via Winamp while playing a game will still experience problems.

gameschild took it upon himself to write an openal output plugin for winamp. I recently tested this plugin and it seems to work really really well. For those still trying to find the perfect solution might like to try it out as well. It does lack a lot of the features that the latest winamp direct sound output plugin include, however it has come a long way.

Author website: http://www.wumpus.co.uk/
Forum post: Link
Download: 0.5.2

Found this on another blog originally but still found it good to post. For someone that visit a website where Javascript is used a lot I find any browser that improve on that performance a huge bonus.

http://eu.wowarmory.com can get really slow at times especially when you have a game open on your pc and browsing this.

Mozilla is now at the point where they realize, the browser is fully feature packed but will need something else to have a edge over browsers like Opera 9.5 which improved javascript performance as well as the new Internet Explorer 7.

With the nightly builds of Firefox beta 3 they also have a PGO version (Profile-Guided Optimization) which takes the performance even further.

Original post is here

1. Firefox 3 Nightly (PGO Optimized): 7263.8ms
2. Firefox 3 Nightly (02/25/2008 build): 8219.4ms
3. Opera 9.5.9807 Beta: 10824.0ms
4. Firefox 3 Beta 3: 16080.6ms
5. Safari 3.0.4 Beta: 18012.6ms
6. Firefox 2.0.0.12: 29376.4ms
7. Internet Explorer 7: 72375.0ms

Firefox 3 Beta 4 is expected to be released in the next few weeks, and you can expect to see these (and many more) improvements shining through!