Should the PB Team be encouraged to use OpenAL?

[Rescator]

However, our source at Creative Labs exclusively revealed to Custom PC that the company has developed a driver for its X-Fi range of sound cards that will allow for full hardware sound processing in all games, not only those that use OpenAL. The driver works by intercepting DirectSound 3D calls from the game code and converting them into OpenAL on the fly, before these calls reach the DirectX 10 API. By converting the calls to OpenAL, Creative circumvents the limitations of Windows Vista.

Good! I was hoping Creative would do that, looking at the diagrams in the creative forum post I saw that MS had made it possible to do something similar to that. (instead of passing the sound streams to the DirectSound software mixer they direct it to OpenAL instead)
Which is good news, but this also means that OpenAL will most likely be installed with the soundcard drivers as well.

Games will either use the OpenAL32.dll or they will use DirectSound (which gets directed halfway through by a special wrapper which is similar to OpenAL32.dll in that it uses cl_oal.dll or whatever the native Creative OpenAL library is called for creative cards)

However the latency is obviously higher so new games will most likely use OpenAL32.dll instead.
But it's nice to hear they managed to find a solution, lots of upset X-FI on Vista owners out there recently

[White Eagle]

windows has inbuild DirectSound, DirectMusic funtions... so, why not use this inbuild functions?

As of Vista, DX no longer supports hardware accelerated sound. If you want hardware acceleration for your sound, you have no choice but to use a 3rd party API that supports it.