Technology
The aim of EAX has nothing to do with 3D audio positioning. This is usually done by a sound library like Microsoft's DirectSound3D or OpenAL. Rather, EAX can be seen as a library of hardware-accelerated sound effects. EAX is used in many popular titles including Doom 3 and Prey. These games support EAX 4.0 if audio hardware with an OpenAL-supporting driver is present. Because hardware acceleration for DirectSound and DirectSound3D was dropped in Windows Vista, OpenAL will likely become more important for game developers who wish to use EAX in their games.
Most releases of EAX versions coincide with increases in the number of simultaneous voices processable in hardware by the audio processor: the original EAX 1.0 supports 8 voices, while EAX 5.0 allows 128 voices (and up to 4 effects applied to each).
Read more about this topic: Environmental Audio Extensions
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