For all of the EAX soundblaster card owners out there (X-fi, audigi), you might have noticed the crappy support for audio hardware acceleration in Vista when it comes to 3D games. To make MS Vista "more" secure they decided to remove the Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) for DirectSound and DirectSound3D. Since the soundblater cards heavily relied on DirectSound/3D, the HAL removal rendered the soundcards useless since hardware accelerations was no longer supported.

There is good news however, Creative have finished its ALchemy project, which will allow audio hardware acceleration in games that support OpenAL. Furthermore, by simply copying a couple of files to your game directory, which is done by the installer or manually by advanced users, you can now enjoy games that only support the now "legacy" DirectSound/3D drivers while having the hardware acceleration support of Windows Xp. For more info and instructions on the ALchemy project visit Creative.

ALchemy is free for X-Fi owners. Bad news however for Audigi owners, who will have to pay $10 for the ALchemy drivers.