Technology
The aim of EAX has nothing to do with 3D audio positioning. This is usually done by a sound library like Microsoft's DirectSound3D or OpenAL. Rather, EAX can be seen as a library of hardware-accelerated sound effects. EAX is used in many popular titles including Doom 3 and Prey. These games support EAX 4.0 if audio hardware with an OpenAL-supporting driver is present. Because hardware acceleration for DirectSound and DirectSound3D was dropped in Windows Vista, OpenAL will likely become more important for game developers who wish to use EAX in their games.
Most releases of EAX versions coincide with increases in the number of simultaneous voices processable in hardware by the audio processor: the original EAX 1.0 supports 8 voices, while EAX 5.0 allows 128 voices (and up to 4 effects applied to each).
Read more about this topic: Environmental Audio Extensions
Famous quotes containing the word technology:
“One can prove or refute anything at all with words. Soon people will perfect language technology to such an extent that they’ll be proving with mathematical precision that twice two is seven.”
—Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860–1904)
“Primitive peoples tried to annul death by portraying the human body—we do it by finding substitutes for the human body. Technology instead of mysticism!”
—Max Frisch (1911–1991)
“Radio put technology into storytelling and made it sick. TV killed it. Then you were locked into somebody else’s sighting of that story. You no longer had the benefit of making that picture for yourself, using your imagination. Storytelling brings back that humanness that we have lost with TV. You talk to children and they don’t hear you. They are television addicts. Mamas bring them home from the hospital and drag them up in front of the set and the great stare-out begins.”
—Jackie Torrence (b. 1944)