Hiradur

Are your headphones recognized as such in the OS? Not necessarily. Positional audio on 2 speakers can be quite good. It is important to have the speakers set up a in an equi-distant stereo triangle though. HRTF over speakers sounds wrong and negatively impacts positional audio as far as my experience goes. If you have a set of surround speakers you should enable ambisonics processing in OAL Soft, set the proper decoder (speaker layout) and use hq-mode if possible. It's supposed to give very good surround sound over speakers. I heard it once and was impressed. But note that speaker placement is important here. Although there is an option to configure speaker positions manually I would try to stick to the "standard" for 5.1 (see 5.1 preset). This should give the best compability with other audio engines as well as movies and so on. That is unless you only use your speaker set for gaming, using a more balanced layout such as 4.0 quadraphonic may yield better results then.If you have a 7.1 system you could even try the 3D7.1 speaker for an improved sensation of height. It's best to refer to the documentation if you want to dive into the topic: https://github.com/kcat/openal-soft/blob/master/docs/ambisonics.txt

Forcing HRTF causes incorrect filtering on speaker setups. Recent OpenAL Soft versions autodetect if headphones or speakers are used and turn on HRTF automatically. I think the autodetection only works if your audio jack is clearly labeled as a headphone jack in the OS (e.g. front outputs of onboard audio). I was talking about audio playback but reading over the sentence again I could definitely have expressed it in a better way. I edited the above post to make it a bit more clear.

Don't forget about 24:10 monitors.

I can reproduce this when swinging the sword a dozen times in the Training Mission. I don't know. Found another sound that should be mono instead of stereo for proper positional audio: tdm_sound_vocals04.pk4/sound/voices/generic/sniff01.wav

Since r_fovRatio is 0 by default and r_aspectRatio only has a limited amount of aspect ratios available it's still necessary to set r_fovRatio manually on screens with aspect ratios which are not present in r_aspectRatio. I wonder if a better approach would be to always default to the native monitor resolution in fullscreen mode and calculate r_fovRatio based on that resolution assuming square pixels. Of course it should still be possible to force specific resolutions and aspect ratios. Always defaulting to the native resolution would be nice for laptop users who connect their device to monitors/TVs with different resolutions frequently.

But in the default configuration it's always overwritten by r_aspectRatio, isn't it?

The correct way to set the aspect ratio on ultrawides should be r_fovRatio: Because r_aspectRatio only allows certain classes:

Two more issues I noticed, although they are probably not 2.06 specific and might have been mentioned before: - lack of support for ultrawide aspect ratios and resolutions, at least the following resolutions should be added: * 21:9 (actual aspect ratio is 64:27) resolutions: 2560x1080 3440x1440 5120x2160 * 24:10 resolutions: 3840x1600 * 29:9 resolutions: 3840x1200 * 32:9 resolutions: 3840x1080 5120x1440 Maybe on this occasion support for 18:9 resolutions should be added as well in case someone wants to stream to a mobile device. Since UHD2 monitors are available now I think 7680x4320 should be added to 16:9 as well. - A few sound effects are apparently in stereo and thus receive no positional treatment. Only sound effects in mono can be used for positional audio. An example is sneeze01.ogg in tdm_sound_vocals04.pk4. There are a few more but I'm unsure if it's intentional (i.e. if some machine sounds should have more of a room filling sound rather than being able to pinpoint them to their origin). However, for the sneeze sound it's important to have positional audio, right now it sounds like a sneezing guard is very close/in the same room even if he is far away.

I put these settings into autoexec.cfg and verified ingame that they are indeed all set to zero. The output of INTEL_DEBUG=perf didn't change however, it's still showing the same. Performance was notably worse with scissors turned off, ca. 25%. Yes, sorry about that. I didn't want to create a new thread but this thread isn't the best place for this either.

For fun I ran the TDM 2.06 64 bit Linux release with the INTEL_DEBUG=perf environment variable set. For every rendered frame I saw this output: I got this on all 3 maps I tested (Training Mission, A New Job, Volta 1). Maybe it's worth investigating (see notes below though). OS: Debian 9 GPU: Intel HD Graphics 520 Driver version: Mesa 13.0.6 Binary: 64 bit Linux binary Settings: r_useFBO 1, pretty high settings, soft shadows off Mesa 13.0.6 is a bit dated by now so I would suggest to verify this with a newer Mesa version if possible. Note: TDM said that the OpenGL extension EXT_depths_bound_test wasn't found, I'm not sure if this is related to the fast clear problem or not.

Has this fix for incorrect EFX environment size handling already been applied? http://forums.thedarkmod.com/topic/19310-incorrect-efx-environment-size-handling/?do=findComment&comment=418035 - In Volta 1 I noticed that with SFX Volume at maximum (s_volume_db = 0) sounds become distorted when OpenAL EFX is turned on. Setting s_volume_db = -9 fixes this but it's not ideal because I have to reset this for other missions. - Transitions from one EFX region to another are also noticeable, there is some kind of popping noise. This can be heard right at the start of Volta 1, a few meters from the starting point there is a border between two EFX regions (check console output to see if you moved from one region to the other) and moving between the two regions always causes a popping noise for me. Maybe it's possible to fade out the old effect and fade in the new effect to make the transition smoother or something like that. I'm using the 64 bit Linux build.

Are you using Windows XP? Windows Vista killed audio acceleration which is why EAX doesn't work natively on newer Windows versions. For ALchemy it doesn't matter if you have an EAX capable card or not (assuming you use the hacked version for non Creative cards). All effects are rendered in software so it's equally bad on any card because the emulation by ALchemy is not complete.

In this video you mentioned you want to tweak maps to sound right with ALchemy. IMO you shouldn't do that. ALchemy is notably buggy and not up to par with real EAX. For tweaking maps you should either use Windows XP with an EAX capable sound card or wait for OpenAL EFX effects. Everything else would be wasted effort because ALchemy is not a reference implementation of EAX.

It's been a while since I used Creative ALchemy but I think HRTF through OpenAL Soft and EAX through ALchemy won't work together because the first one calls OpenAL and the second one calls DirectSound3D and I think one can use only one of these APIs at a time. How many maps (and which ones) come with definitions for EAX anyway? I'd assume it's only few because EAX was dead for so long. Without definitions EAX shouldn't do anything, the only thing that would be left would be better 3d audio due to the DirectSound3D -> OpenAL wrapper of ALchemy. OpenAL Soft's 3D audio is better though. That being said I'm looking forward to EFX availability on Linux and hope for more maps to make use of this great feature.

There aren't, but you can create some yourself with the makehrtf tool. Anyway, I'd like to point out here that sample rates higher than 44.1/48 kHz may have a negative impact on playback quality. I don't want to go into the details myself but I recommend reading this article: https://xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html This article was created by the Xiph foundation, they guys behind the free and open source audio codecs FLAC, Vorbis, Opus and a few others.