How to use AMD true Audio on R9-290

hi,

thanks for your detailed explanation, it's very helpful. I basically went to DD live as my amp with discrete inputs went to a different room, so I had to use one with only an optical input and HDMI. At the time, I didn't think about using HDMI, but it sounds like I can use it for 5.1 audio. Will this be DTS audio?

So am I correct in thinking the AMD True audio enhances the audio, which already comes out of HDMI, in games which use True audio?

Thanks again, just one more question, if I use HDMI, will be soundcard now be redundant? It's this one here;

http://www.soundblaster.com/products/sound-blaster-recon3d-pcie.aspx

Thanks again, just one more question, if I use HDMI, will be soundcard now be redundant? It's this one here;

http://www.soundblaster.com/products/sound-blaster-recon3d-pcie.aspx

Allot of people dumped SoundBlaster after they dumped driver support for anybody who upgraded their operating system from XP upwards. There support for Linux was already bad at that time.
Many of us swore never to buy Creative Labs/SoundBlaster again, and stuck to that, even if they were giving the product away for free. I am glad to see AMD finding a way around not only the strategic problems Creative creates, but also Microsoft who is always trying to cut competitors off at the knees instead of developing better products.
The growing Market share of AMD from INTEL, and more people adopting Linux over MS is an indicator
that people do not want to be boxed in to dead, shooting fish in a barrel scenario, where the consumer is the fish.

This is a common misconception. Creative Labs did not dump driver support, Microsoft completely reworked the audio framework in Windows Vista (they reworked the video framework in a similar fashion, but that's not relevant).

Software developers used to be able to go through DirectSound and DirectSound3D to access hardware acceleration features exposed by the audio driver, but the link between DirectSound and the audio driver was deliberately severed in Windows Vista (a change that has carried forward). The net result is much improved audio mixing and system stability, but at the cost of a fixed and inextensible API. Old games that accessed Creative Lab's EAX extensions through the DirectSound API can no longer do so on Windows Vista unless the audio stack is patched in place before starting the application (Creative Alchemy can do this). Alternative audio APIs that do provide access to the sound driver such as OpenAL are still able to use vendor specific extensions. AMD's TrueAudio will be subject to the same limitations, developers wishing to use it will have to use a different API than DirectSound.

Thanks for the info. How did Creative not negotiate with MS to find a solution of some kind?
I did not detect Creative Labs being particulary annoyed with MS, when they ended up losing
customers like me/so many others. Whether or not we got the wrong end of the stick on who's
let who down, it certainly changed perception & the market.

As a backstop, at the very least, and even without a viable techinal solution,
Creative should have give discounts to upgrade customers.
They would to get to ship more volume, maintain market share, deny competitors a new customer,
and maintain customer loyality. Make business sense ?

If this was their attitutude. Then was I, and many other not right in the long run ?

I look forward to the devlopment of True Audio, as some one who has relied on AMD,
after a similar inident with Intel as I had with Creative. ie contriving expensive customer
entire replacements, by tacticaly cutting off transitional/incremental upgrade paths.

Maybe I have just become a cynic ;-)

Hi,

Video cards have had primitive onboard Audio codecs for quite some time, but I must stress the word primitive. Their sole purpose has been to encode audio streams onto HDMI, they do not provide many mechanisms to modify the audio itself, just transport it. Audio signal processing must still be done in software or through the GPU's stream processors. TrueAudio embeds several full featured audio DSPs onto the R9-290 and R9-290X. This allows audio processing to be done in hardware on the GPU without bogging down the CPU or the GPU's stream processors.

The difficulty here is that using the TrueAudio DSPs requires appropriate supporting software. Most game developers use middleware to perform functions such as this.

Thanks to some quality control issues on the part of Audio vendors, Microsoft rewrote the Windows audio stack in Windows Vista and deliberately removed any direct path between the DirectSound library and the driver, preventing hardware extensions from being used in any way. This resolved a significant number of BSODs, but disabled the use of hardware acceleration when DirectSound is the audio API of choice.

Creative Lab's EAX is a good example of this. EAX is a set of hardware accelerated functions which enhance the fidelity of environmental audio, not a whole lot unlike TrueAudio is capable of doing. Many older games (Thief, F.E.A.R, and Diablo 2 come to mind) implemented it through DirectSound before support for hardware acceleration was dropped in Windows Vista. By default, attempting to enable "environmental audio" will be grayed out in these games unless a workaround is used through Creative Lab's Alchemy which restores support on a title-by-title basis. Modern games wishing to employ these extensions must use an alternative to DirectSound such as OpenAL or some proprietary middleware.

The takeaway here is that absent express use of the DSP functions of your discrete sound card through OpenAL, it acts as little more than a mixer and filter. The real benefit of using a discrete card over an onboard card is the much higher signal to noise ratio and output bandwidth, but this is only really applicable to the endpoint that converts the digital samples into an analogue waveform destined for a headset or speakers. When you use a digital transport such as S/PDIF or HDMI the onus for conversion is shifted to the external amplifier, which is often better than even the best discrete cards.

If you're using an external amplifier with an HDMI input I would forego using your discrete soundcard at all unless you're playing games that support features found on that card. The quality of the audio will be the same, regardless of whether it comes from an optical connection from your discrete card, or an HDMI connection from your video card.

If you want the best of both worlds, you may wish to look into an audio bridge cable which connects discrete sound card output to the HDMI output of most video cards. I've never looked into this myself, but I've heard a bit about it.

As for connection, take HDMI from your PC to your amplifier, and then use a passive HDMI to DVI converter to bring it to your display. HDMI and Single-Link DVI-D are electrically identical, with HDMI just having some newer features. It should work just fine.

As a side node, I would advise against using Dolby Digital Live. It's a lossy compression format. I used it for a while and was not very impressed with it at all. I fell back to good old 3.5mm jacks for my headphones and an HDMI cable for my surround system. I simply switch audio devices based on where I want the audio to go.