Creative Tech Original Find Whats up with this, as I understand it Microsoft fumbled around OpenGL support under Vista a while back, and from the above, have now changed audio acceleration under Vista, and games are falling back to OpenAL? and some older games need user modified game folders otherwise they will be stero? Not to mention you need X-Fi or else you cant run it.

Another reason I'm in no hurry to upgrade my main computer to vista since I'm still using an audigy2 card and refuse to get a x-fi card until creative release linux drivers for it!

Yes, Microsoft realized that the hardware acceleration for D3D was so shoddy and bug prone in most drivers, that they moved it into software and just got rid of the hardware path. If you want to create a stable system, that's probably the right thing to do. It does, however, add a little bit of load on current CPUs.

Meanwhile, someone writing to OpenAL will still get accelerated 3D on Vista, as soon as Creative releases OpenAL drivers that talk directly to their hardware. Assuming those drivers can pass driver signing -- else installing those drivers will cause all HD content to be down-sampled to standard definition. Now there's a really annoying change -- the HD "sandbox" model for "premium content" which means that you no longer can use unsigned drivers on your machine if you care about media playback.