GW's EAX not working with Vista

I just upgraded to Vista and the EAX sound option is grayed out and I have all the newest vista drivers. (Worked fine on XP Pro)


On Board Realtek AC850 sound card
P5N32 SLI Deluxe mother board

Anyone else having the same problem or have a fix/work around?

You have to have an X-Fi brand creative card (at least for now)

Then grab this program - http://preview.creativelabs.com/alchemy/default.aspx
Creative Labs Alchemy

Microsoft removed Direct Sound 3D from Vista (completely) which EAX uses to run. This is a work around to re-direct EAX using another audio format called OpenAL.
The X-Fi cards are the only current cards that Creative has OpenAL working under Vista.

Microsoft actually removed the hardware sound acceleration from Vista entirely, all sounds in Vista are processed by the CPU, and this means a lot of hardware-accelerated effects (like EAX) aren't supported anymore.

The only way to get hardware-accelerated sound in Vista is to bypass DirectX and go with OpenAL, but very few drivers have been updated yet (and very few games too). Creative's approach is to try and redirect DirectX sounds to OpenAL, to get hardware accelerated sound again in old and existing games, but that's still quirky for now.

If you don't have a high-end dual-core CPU, until every ones supports OpenAL, you may probably want to reduce sound quality and turn off 3D sound in Vista, or your framerate will suffer.

Thanks for the info, I was unaware that that MS did that, I'm glad I asked here.

My cpu is Intel Pentium Extreme Edition 965 Dual Core 3.73GHz 1066MHz 2x2MB so I shouldn't have any problems running Guild Wars.