hardware acceleration for sound

[ReadyMan]

I've got a couple of newer games (supcom forged alliance, grid defense: awakening) that will only play sound effects sound on my headphones, not on my desktop speakers (tho the music comes thru on these for some reason).
I find that if I scale my sound hardware acceleration to basic, this fixes the problem and I get sound and effects from all speakers.

Usually I have the acceleration set to full.
I have an x-fi sound card.

Is there much of a difference between the basic and the full?
Is it worth just playing with headphones? Or for that matter, is there enough of a difference that I wouldnt want to play without it?

I'm wondering if the power of my cpu would kick in to offset this...

Thanks!
RM

[Foil]

Are your speakers and headphones plugged into separate jacks?

[ReadyMan]

speakers and headphones are all plugged into the soundcard itself (as opposed to the front/top connectors of the tower).

[Foil]

Is this a 5.1 soundcard, with three separate 1/2\" audio-out jacks?

My guess is that your headphones are probably plugged into the left-front/right-front jack, and your desktop speakers are plugged into the left-rear/right-rear jack. Music in those games is often played through all channels, but the effects are sometimes only heard on the left-front/right-front channels.

If that's the case, you need to split the same audio to both. A y-splitter works fine for me.

[ReadyMan]

Good find Foil!
I tried the splitter, but it wont fit and allow the mic to be plugged in.
The headphone connectors in my case dont work (never worked for that matter...and messed with it again during my recent upgrade, but couldnt get them to function)....so the only options are the sound card.

BTW, the splitter did push the effects sound thru to the headphones and the dt speakers.

So I guess I'm back to whether hardware acceleration is worth it or not....

[Foil]

I personally use y-splitters like this, under $5 at Wal-Mart. I'd recommend doing that rather than cutting down the audio acceleration, especially if you end up using 5.1 speakers and/or a 5.1 headset sometime in the future.

[EngDrewman]

I also have a soundblaster card, the Audigy 2 notebook edition, and have had similar problems. In my case, the software switches between headphones and the speakers. The source of the problem was that the game was trying to override the software settings, and thus tweaking the audio settings of the game fixed the problem. Try setting the audio device in your game to \"default device\" instead of your x-fi card. This is how I did it.

[ReadyMan]

bought a splitter like the one you posted and everything works great. Nice workaround!
Thanks for the help!

So is hardware acceleration really that helpful?

[EngDrewman]

So is hardware acceleration really that helpful?

Yes, in most cases you will notice a difference.

[Jeff250]

Not really. The trend in operating systems (see Vista or PulseAudio) is to now do all sound processing on the CPU so that the OS has more flexibility in what it can do with the sound, e.g. per application volume control or piping the sound over a network. Hardware acceleration was a big deal when everyone had single core Pentium 200MHz processors, or worse. But nowadays, the hit to the CPU is negligible. But don't tell that to Creative, whose livelihood depends on you thinking otherwise!