[SOLVED] I am wondering if Creative ALchemy benefits my Windows 10 sound system.

[kaishlothon]

I have a Sound Blaster Rx/5 that runs my 5.1 surround sound home theater system and was wondering if the Creative ALchemy program that came with it does anything beneficial. I use Windows 10 64-bit Home and if there's any other info that would be helpful I could give let me know. Thanks for your time.

 

[hotaru.hino]

ALchemy is only useful for games that use DirectSound or OpenAL, which was prevalent from the early to the mid 2000s. Both were deprecated when Vista came out. It doesn't do anything for modern games.

 

[kaishlothon]

ALchemy is only useful for games that use DirectSound or OpenAL, which was prevalent from the early to the mid 2000s. Both were deprecated when Vista came out. It doesn't do anything for modern games.

I know but I had EAX support with rome total war (not the remake) but now it doesn't work even though the Audiogy rx/5 says it should and it did a decade ago. 🙁 So the software can't fix my problem?

 

[gamerk316]

Alchemy does one and only one job: It restores EAX extensions by remapping them to OpenAL. It does nothing for titles without EAX support.

In order to reduce the number of audio issues due to shoddy (Creative) drivers, Microsoft made the decision in Vista to make Directsound a software-only API that can only handle basic stereo output. As EAX was built as an extension to Directsound, Vista effectively broke EAX support. Creative solved this by creating a program (Alchemy) that remaps their Directsound calls to OpenAL ones instead, restoring the effects.