[Openal] OpenAL 1.1 (OS X) alGenBuffers problem

[Edmund Zavada]

I recently switched over from a custom built OpenAL 1.0.6 to using  
Apple's prebuilt OpenAL 1.1 on OS X 10.4, mainly to save myself the  
trouble of building a Universal binary version.

However, this has introduced severe stuttering and loss of frame  
rates into my game. Shark shows that 74.1% of the CPU time of the  
game is being used in OpenAL iterating it's buffer list, whereas with  
the old version this wasn't even 1%. After adding a bit of  
instrumentation, it seems that the first call I make to alGenBuffers 
(1, &buf) is returning a value of 2401, whereas in 1.0.6 it used to  
return 1 as the buffer number.

I've isolated this down to where there are no other changes other  
than the use of OpenAL 1.1.

I suspect this means that when I run this with OpenAL 1.1 there are  
somehow already 2400 buffers allocated, which is consistent with the  
increased time spent iterating the buffer list.

Has anyone else seen this? Is the 2400 just some arbitrary base  
that's added on? If so, what else could be causing this massive CPU  
consumption by OpenAL?


Ed Zavada