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I'm still pretty convinced that the Aureal Vortex 2 is one of the best soundcards (if not still the best) in terms of hardware and 3d API's. But I haven't been able to find any comparisons of EAX:HD to A3D 2.0/3.0. I was curious if anyone had any thoughts on this.

Also, who do you think poses the biggest threat to Creative in terms of becoming "the next Aureal"? I've seen little to nothing from other soundcards that push the 3d audio envelope.

there are no decent drivers for current OS's, so you cant really test it, and if you did, it wouldnt mean anything because the company is long gone.

I still have my Diamond Monster MX300 and it's MUCH better sounding than the SB Audigy. It's too bad it will be stuck in my Win98 box forever. WinXP compatibility is flaky at best.

Aureal were in court with Creative. Creative alleged they stole their IP. Aureal came up innocent, but the case made them bankrupt. Creative bought them out after that, I believe. So Aureal won but they lost.

From memory, Nvidia snagged some jobless Aureal engineers to create SoundStorm. I could be wrong tho..

atidriverssuck wrote:

Aureal were in court with Creative. Creative alleged they stole their IP. Aureal came up innocent, but the case made them bankrupt. Creative bought them out after that, I believe. So Aureal won but they lost.

From memory, Nvidia snagged some jobless Aureal engineers to create SoundStorm. I could be wrong tho..

I hadn't read about the soundstorm angle. Thanks for the heads-up!
Anyone else know anything about this?

MrBonusBuy wrote:

atidriverssuck wrote:

Aureal were in court with Creative. Creative alleged they stole their IP. Aureal came up innocent, but the case made them bankrupt. Creative bought them out after that, I believe. So Aureal won but they lost.

From memory, Nvidia snagged some jobless Aureal engineers to create SoundStorm. I could be wrong tho..

I hadn't read about the soundstorm angle. Thanks for the heads-up!
Anyone else know anything about this?

Check these 2 articles from 2001:
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=1772
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=1496

Both of them mention ex-Aureal engineers being involved in the creation of the audio side of the nforce chipset. I had a strong feeling I wasn't going senile yet

Great! Thanks for the links.

So do you guys think it's safe to say that EAX: HD is inferior to A3D 2.0 or 3.0? I think Grand Theft Auto is the only game to support both.

I like A3D 2.0 much better than EAX: HD, even though I hate Creative and haven't had too much experience with it. From what little experience I do have, I think the positioning is much more accurate and more discrete.

As far as Aureal Vortex 2 goes, I have a MX300 running, although it's in my oldest box. My middle (for lack of a better term) box has a Hercules Game Theater XP, and my main box has an M-Audio Revolution (which I just got this week), so the MX300 has some pretty hefty company. With my new card, I'm sad to say that the MX300 has been dethroned. As much as I love that card and the memory of an audio company that actually tried to be innovative (i.e. the anti-Creative...which makes you think of the irony behind their name...), I'd have to say that the Revolution and it's 24-bit/192kHz Via Envy24HT just sound better. The GTXP is close, but not quite as good as either of the other two.

Just my two cents,
Squibby

Squibby wrote:

I like A3D 2.0 much better than EAX: HD, even though I hate Creative and haven't had too much experience with it. From what little experience I do have, I think the positioning is much more accurate and more discrete.

As far as Aureal Vortex 2 goes, I have a MX300 running, although it's in my oldest box. My middle (for lack of a better term) box has a Hercules Game Theater XP, and my main box has an M-Audio Revolution (which I just got this week), so the MX300 has some pretty hefty company. With my new card, I'm sad to say that the MX300 has been dethroned. As much as I love that card and the memory of an audio company that actually tried to be innovative (i.e. the anti-Creative...which makes you think of the irony behind their name...), I'd have to say that the Revolution and it's 24-bit/192kHz Via Envy24HT just sound better. The GTXP is close, but not quite as good as either of the other two.

Just my two cents,
Squibby

Good to hear. But the Envy24HT doesn't have any sort of 3d hardware acceleration or API's, right? Ugh. And I hear Doom III won't even support hardware audio.

I have a Terratec vortex 2 which has optical out but i haven't been able to use it because my tos-link cable wont fit it ( wont go in all the way ) i would like to hear how it sounds when my amps dacs are doing the work.


I also think A3D 2.0/3.0 is much better then any form of EAX, The theif games sound much better on my vortex 2 then on any of my other cards.


Quake 3 used A3D 3.0.

Good to hear. But the Envy24HT doesn't have any sort of 3d hardware acceleration or API's, right? Ugh. And I hear Doom III won't even support hardware audio.

Well, the reason Doom III doesn't support hardware audio (if that is, in fact, the case) is because audio doesn't take up much CPU anyway. In Tech-Reports review of the M-Audio Revolution, which uses the Via Envy24HT, they included several game benchmarks, and the Revolution ended up last in each one--but never by too much (with the exception of the synthetic bench, which I tend to not care about). Basically, you sacrifice a few FPS for much higher quality sound. And when I'm still getting over 60 FPS anway, I don't care.

In Quake III (on the high end machine at 1024x768), for instance, it was the difference between 225.1 FPS on the non-HT Envy24 and 213.2 FPS on the Revolution. The biggest difference was with Serious Sam using EAX. Obviously, since EAX is Creative's own API, they had the upper hand. Again at 1024x768, the Audigy 2 got 107.7 FPS, and the Revolution got 93.8 FPS. Now, if you can tell the difference between 107.7 and 93.8, you're full of...um...it.

Basically, I think if you have the hardware to play a given game at a reasonable framerate, then you shouldn't notice the difference with hardware accelerated audio. Even if the difference was noticable, I'll trade a few FPS for higher quality audio anyday. It's like turning on FSAA/AF--you're gonna lose FPS, but it's worth the sacrifice to make everything look nicer.

Squibby