Re: AMD weighs in on HD versus 4K

On Tue, 03 Jun 2025 10:49:45 -0400, in comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.action,
Spalls Hurgenson wrote:

On Sat, 31 May 2025 19:38:39 -0400, Spalls Hurgenson
<spallshurgenson@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>

I'm not sure I'd recommend a Creative card, though. I suspect my
current issue is with the card itself, and not some Windows thing. I
had a similar problem with another Soundblaster; it just stopped
outputting from one of its ports (fortunately, my motherboard on that
computer supported 5.1 so it wasn't really an issue). I think there
are some real issues with the quality of the components on Creative's
offerings.

>
Update:
>
Fortunately, it turns out to be 'just some Windows thing', in that it
was software that caused the problem and not a hardware failure. It
turns out there are /at least/ three places you have to enable 5.1
speakers to get it to work in a game:
>
    1) in the Soundblaster driver software app
    2) in the Windows "sound settings" applet
    3) in the game itself.
>
I'd configured the latter two, but had forgotten the first even
existed, and for some reason it had toggled itself to 2.1 mode for
some reason.
>
Computers. Go figure.
>

These days, it's almost always a software problem, simply due to the
odds. There are just so goddamn many bugs. QC is a lost art, as is clean
code.

I'm surprised when I diagnose a hardware error in this era. It happens,
but I always exhaust all software options before I start running hardware
diagnostics, and rarely get to the point where I have to run it.*

--
Zag

What's the point of growing up
if you can't be childish sometimes? ...Terrance Dicks, BBC
`````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````

* One of my old computers, on upgrade to the initial release of Windows
10 from 8.1, "upgraded" to known broken Realtek onboard audio drivers
which disabled speaker mute on headphone plug-in. They literally *kept*
broken drivers when there were working drivers available. It took forever
to figure it out, and forever to find the old drivers when I finally did.
That was the day I stopped checking hardware first, because I wasted a
lot of time trying to diagnose hardware. It goes back that far.