What is Xaudio API?

[saulsadip]

What's the point of it? What's the benefit of enabling it?

[Affronter]

Who's telling you to enable it?

[saulsadip]

Автор сообщения: Affronter

Who's telling you to enable it?

Friendly guy, eh?

[Vellari]

XAudio2 is a low-level audio API that provides signal processing and mixing foundation for high performance audio engines. Dsigned for use by game developers who want to improve performance in their games.

No particular reason not to enable it, unless you have some crap tier/legacy motherboard audio that doesn't work with it.

[saulsadip]

Автор сообщения: Vellari

XAudio2 is a low-level audio API that provides signal processing and mixing foundation for high performance audio engines. Dsigned for use by game developers who want to improve performance in their games.

No particular reason not to enable it, unless you have some crap tier/legacy motherboard audio that doesn't work with it.

Alright, that works for me. Thanks

[Xio001]

The very short answer, turn Xaudio2 ON

Discussion:
As you already know its a low level API and in this specific case it handles direct access to the sound cards processing capabilities. A long time ago MS-DOS 4.11, we had to settle for sound coming out from a mono speaker that was 2", stuck inside the computer case that sounded like a busted speaker, but WOW! My computer had sound effects! The process to getting that sound out, was writing a program that will interface with the motherboard to specify frequency and durations, no volume control. Your boss better not be around or they will definitely know you are not working. Anyways, that program can be considered a low level API. Then came Windows 3.0-3.1, and sound boards were becoming more ubiquitous. Now games can can have some fancy sound effects. In order for you to enjoy that sound, you needed to have the drivers installed (check) and the game either support SoundBlaster (API) audio directly or windows sound compatible. If the GAME supported SoundBlaster, it can access the sound card directly bypassing any processor interactions, no lag. However, if it did not, you had to settle for Windows sound processing which did involve the processor and you would get very "laggy" sound and sometimes it just would not work. Microsoft seeing that it will be left in the dust if it did not get its OS sound subsystem up to par when it comes to games and loosing money since they would have to pay royalties once SoundBlaster wised up, created DirectX. DirectX provided a universal way for Game developers to directly access the computer hardware, in this case the soundcard's abilities without using the processor. Now, any game developer can use DirectX and get sound out from their games without having to require SoundBlaster specific API. Over the years DirectX has progressed to include new features/options that hardware developers have added to their boards, thus requiring Microsoft to make revisions to DirectX.

So know we are at DirectX 12 and there are limitations to the sound system. To address some of those, XAudio2 comes into play. Notice the 'X'? Guess where it originates from... You got it, DirectX. XAudio2 includes more features that Game developers can utilize. However, your hardware must have those features built in to utilize them and/or other features of XAudio2 are just virtualizations. Just keep in mind, the game must call out those features. Since Cyberpunk does have an option for it, I assume that they are utilizing some of those features that are not available in DirectX 11 or 12.
Below is a link to Microsoft's XAudio2, intro. Scroll to the bottom to the heading "When to USE XAudio2".

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/xaudio2/xaudio2-introduction