I
n December 2006, I took RealTek to the woodshed for its
cheating drivers, which made many EAX-enabled games sound
simply awful.
For months, we’ve been rattling motherboard makers, includ-
ing Nvidia (which uses RealTek parts on many of its reference
motherboards), about the issue, but RealTek seemed not to get
the message, as nothing changed—until recently, that is. Indeed,
I was pretty surprised when testing XFX’s nForce 780i-based
motherboard to fi nd that RealTek had fi nally fi xed the problem
with EAX support.
The problem was that RealTek HD Audio drivers would tell
games that EAX support was enabled, which would cause
games to pass off the audio mixing to the soundcard drivers. In
RealTek’s case, that often (though not always) produced terrible
sound. A tank that was supposed to sound as though it was 200
meters away sounded like it was 10 meters away. And instead of
a grenade sounding muffl ed by the presence of a wall, it sounded
like it was next to you.
Why would RealTek do this? Falsely claiming to have EAX sup-
port is akin to a videocard driver claiming to run16x AA fi ltering
when, in reality, no fi ltering is occurring.But RealTek’s R 1.86 drivers dated February 1, 2008 seem to
fi nally enable EAX. Using RightMark’s 3D Sound positioning util-
ity, I found that the occlusion effect fi nally worked as it does on
all other EAX-enabled cards. The obstruction effect almost works
but is a bit heavy-handed, blocking all sound when you should
still hear some audio.
In real-world gaming tests, however, EAX support seemed spo-
radic. Battlefi eld 2 audio was as poor as it was previously when
EAX was enabled and the game let the RealTek part do the mix-
ing. But when we fi red up the EAX-enabled BioShock and ran the
new drivers through their paces, with EAX and reverb enabled, the
experience wasn’t bad. Compared to an X-Fi XtremeGamer sound-
card, the onboard RealTek component’s audio was still clearly infe-
rior but at least not intolerable, as it was with Battlefi eld 2.
I’ll continue to follow this issue, but at least it appears that
RealTek is fi nally addressing the problem.And thinks the company’s cheating drivers might
finally be fixed, maybein the lab REAL-WORLD TESTING: RESULTS. ANALYSIS. RECOMMENDATIONS
With older RealTek drivers, a simple position test would show
that EAX filtering wasn’t working correctly.GORDON MAH UNG
Re-Examines
RealTek Audio
W
hat do you do with a media-streaming device that doesn’t
connect to anything? That’s the question posed by the HP
Media Vault NAS, which I reviewed this month (page 79). I found
that I was unable to stream a movie on the device’s hard drive to
any connected platform in my house, including Windows Media
Player 11 and the Xbox 360.
But determining the culprit in this media mess wasn’t as cut-
and-dried as I expected. I was ready to hoist the sails and speed
away from the sinking HP device, but a little bit of research
brought a new target to bear: Microsoft. The company has alleg-
edly modifi ed the open UPnP protocol the Xbox uses to connectto devices. Company reps won’t admit to any outright fudging,
but something seems suspicious in their response: “The Xbox
360 console is optimized to communicate with Microsoft UPnP
streaming devices... to provide the best possible consumer expe-
rience with the Xbox 360 dashboard.”
The blog Mediaholic interviewed the CTO of TwonkyVision at
the 2006 Consumer Electronics Show—TwonkyVision being the
creator of TwonkyMedia, the streaming service the QNAP TS-109
Pro NAS box uses to connect to the Xbox. This works, according
to the CTO, because Twonky reverse engineered the protocol to
end-run Microsoft’s Windows Media Connect-only restriction.
If that’s correct—and I suspect it is—that’s why I’m hacked off.
An open standard is dubbed “open” for an explicit reason: A prod-
uct that follows the standard should be able to interoperate with
other standard-friendly devices. You’re not following the standard if
you’re tweaking it to work with only your branded platforms.
HP might share some blame for not fi guring out a way to make
streaming work, but why should a company have to reinvent a
wheel that Microsoft’s broken?David Murphy
Doesn’t Like Microsoft
Mucking with Standards
Guess who’s to blame for your media-streaming woes
70 MAXIMUMPC (^) | APR 08 (^) | http://www.maximumpc.com