x64 EAX driver issues

[silentdebuggers]

I have noticed that certain creative cards (I've personally tested Audigy 2 and the Creative X-Fi) lose their eax hardware acceleration when installed in a 64-bit system with more than 4gb of ram.

You can observe this issue by running the dxdiag test or by trying to set eax as an option in games (e.g. Guildwars). At 3gb of system memory, eax will function perfectly. At the 4gb mark, hardware support cuts out.

I believe this issue is related to addressing space for the creative drivers. After testing several sets of creative drivers, I was unable to resolve this issue.

There is a fix however-- the Mr. Magic modified driver. You can find links here: http://www.planetamd64.com/lofiversion/index.php?t27037.html

Although not too many people are running into this issue (b/c it requires both a 64-bit operating system and 4gb+ of ram) at the present, I think this could get to be a bigger issue in the future as systems begin to ship with more ram. If anyone else is having trouble with x64 eax support, feel free to pm me and I will try to help you.

 

[aja]

Good tip, thanks!

 

[TTP]

I didn't think I had this problem until I installed NWN2: Mask of the Betrayer on my Vista 64bit system. That game would not let me enable EAX at all. I'll try this out to see if it will fix it. Thanks.

 

[aaronjb]

I didn't think I had this problem until I installed NWN2: Mask of the Betrayer on my Vista 64bit system. That game would not let me enable EAX at all. I'll try this out to see if it will fix it. Thanks.

You need to install the Creative AlChemy drivers to bridge the gap for older titles which use EAX. Because of the new driver structure, some titles won't work under Vista (32- or 64-bit) without the Alchemy translation layer.

http://www.soundblaster.com/alchemy/

 

[TTP]

You need to install the Creative AlChemy drivers to bridge the gap for older titles which use EAX. Because of the new driver structure, some titles won't work under Vista (32- or 64-bit) without the Alchemy translation layer.

http://www.soundblaster.com/alchemy/

I did that, but then I found out the error last night. The profile that Alchemy uses is incorrect. The registry setting they use in the game profiles was pointing to the wrong spot. I had to go in and change the profile setup to reflect the correct registry setting.

for example:

Creative's original profile registry entry for NWN2 was HKLCM/SOFTWARE/Obsidian/NWN 2/Location

under Vista 64bit is needs to be:
HKLCM/SOFTWARE/Wow6432Node/Obsidian/NWN 2/Location

It's all working fine now.