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Topic on Glossary talk:Sound card

Mirh (talkcontribs)

First DirectSound3D Game EXtensions debuted 3 months after Xonar D2 release (their first soundcard) and its only purpose was to restore DS3D in Vista, along with common EAX 2.0 support.

GX 2.0 was silently added on the end of February 2008 drivers 8.17.30 and 8.17.31. This introduced the much discussed EAX 5 emulation mode, which was widely featured a week later with the launch of the Xonar DX(which I own :3)
(EAX 3 and 4 can also be supported btw).
As side note.. Asus claims this "also incorporates Dolby Home Theater Technologies", even though these were already previously available (and the diagrams are the same)

Various emulation-translation accuracy tests showed little to none differences when compared to X-fi cards (even though there are still lots of people which believe differently)

Then by the end of 2008 with RC drivers 8.17.47 GX version was bumped to 2.5. Besides the questionable improvements in reverberation quality a much lower CPU footprint was objectively observed.
With subsequent driver releases asus mainly took care of bug fixing and hopefully all of them have been fixed by now.
Personally I hadn't none of the issues early adopters experienced 7 years ago.. (but maybe it's all merit of UNi xonar drivers instead..)

Finally, in the middle of 2012 Asus decided it was time to move on from the evergreen CMI8788 to the blazingly new CM8888DHT. And it did with its new Xonar Phoebus.. This introduced the new GX 3.0 which I couldn't find anything about. Hence I guess it could just be a marketing gimmick It actually has improved stablity and a new server-client
(and then there's this weird thing where WoW shows benefit from DS3D restoration without winXP compatibility)
Driver installer is signed by A-Volute, so I believe some of their technology is used

EDIT: albeit there's a Cm_Oal dll dated 13/12/2007 coming with Asus (and Auzentech/HT) drivers, it's suspiciously "smaller" than the other OpenAL native implementations.
It's reported to not work, but my quite unfunded theory is that it just does only when GX is enabled (and Xear3D?)