I don't really know much about A3D vs. EAX, would anyone mind enlightening me?

I was always on the A3D side, Creative cards were always priced too high in my book.

Too bad Aureal failed, they made good products and there really needed to be competition in the sound card market. Though I don't think Creative can make it forever with their high priced products in this economy, I'm totally impressed with my motherboards built in sound. No, really.

I had a Diamond Sonic Impact S90 (vortex 1) at the time around Unreal.

Vortex 1 is a great card too. It just doesn't have that many accelerated 3D sound channels. I think it has something like 8? I have a Turtle Beach Montego A3Dxstream in the pile. Very good sound quality overall.

A3D is really most amazing in 2 speaker and headphone mode. That's where their HRTF 3D audio functions really rock.

Live! uses Directsound3D for audio positioning and it supports that in hardware. 32 channels. EAX is a superset of DS3D which originally just added reverb presets to create various environments. It can definitely add to immersion. Aureal doesn't do the reverb stuff as well but their 2 speaker 3D sound placement is much better. If you set up a quadraphonic setup with 4 speakers then Live and Vortex are about the same in quality for positioning.

Mobo audio from the past few years is indeed pretty good. I'd rate some of the ones I've heard as equal to a Live! from an analog signal quality perspective. They are actually putting some effort into a clean analog signal and that really is why it's passable now. But when I use headphones it is usually still a little too noisy and I'll stick in one of my old Audigy cards or even a Live! on the kx drivers. Live's rear out is quite high quality but its front is mediocre and kx lets you switch them.

A nice thing about Audigy and X-Fi for games still is their headphone binaural synthesis via CMSS. It will turn a multichannel source into very good headphone spatialization. You configure Windows and the game for 5.1 and set the card to headphone and it sounds great. It really is worthwhile over mobo audio for gaming.

swaaye wrote:

A3D is really most amazing in 2 speaker and headphone mode. That's where their HRTF 3D audio functions really rock.

Would you say that the superquad's, sq2500 or whatever, are worth tracking down? Compared to a non-superquad vortex2 card like the mx300, that is.

Anyone playing unreal tournament with a live or better should download and install

Creative Labs' EAX Library Patch for UnrealTournament; supports EAX-compatible sounds cards. You'll need to install this before adding the individual libraries
http://www.xantaz.net/free-game-files/server- … es/eaxutsys.exe

Creative Labs' EAX Library for UnrealTournament DeathMatch; supports the 24 original UT DM maps only. Install after the EAX Library
http://www.xantaz.net/free-game-files/server- … les/uteaxdm.exe

Creative Labs' EAX Library for UnrealTournament CTF; supports the 9 original UT CTF maps only. Install after the EAX Library Patch
http://unrealtournament2004.filefront.com/fil … ag_Update;72653

Thanks for the links Davros. I forgot about the special EAX patches.

You know that Unreal and UT actually have a OpenAL audio renderer now? It's part of the OldUnreal project. I haven't tried that out too much but it may be interesting with an Audigy or X-Fi.

ratfink wrote:

swaaye wrote:

A3D is really most amazing in 2 speaker and headphone mode. That's where their HRTF 3D audio functions really rock.

Would you say that the superquad's, sq2500 or whatever, are worth tracking down? Compared to a non-superquad vortex2 card like the mx300, that is.

I doubt the differences are noticeable. They all support the same features. I only remember seeing that the later revision Vortex 2 chip had slightly lower CPU usage. They were benching with pretty weak CPUs back then (like Celeron 400) so I don't think this is a perceptible improvement at all.

swaaye wrote:

You know that Unreal and UT actually have a OpenAL audio renderer now? It's part of the OldUnreal project. I haven't tried that out too much but it may be interesting with an Audigy or X-Fi.

I forget offhand which version I installed (I think maybe the OldUnreal Multimedia Update v0.2), but with that installed, it sounds great on an old Sound Blaster Live Value edition (CT4780) under Windows XP SP2. The stereo/quad-surround sound seperation is a lot nicer than the stock Unreal audio drivers, and the EAX effects work fine/sound nice to boot 😀

Links:
http://www.oldunreal.com
http://www.oldunreal.com/downloads.html
http://www.oldunreal.com/oldunrealpatches.html

Yeah they have FMOD and OpenAL audio engines that replace the old Galaxy engine. Live! doesn't do hardware OpenAL so an Audigy or newer might be even more interesting. FMOD can do the EAX reverb without EAX hardware, I believe.

swaaye wrote:

FMOD can do the EAX reverb without EAX hardware, I believe.

Yes, that's true.

BTW, @ALL, a side note: If you have a proggie that uses FMOD and it's EAX effects features, in conjunction with a soound card that natively supports EAX (such as the Sound Blaster Live), you'll need to disable the sound card's hardware EAX in order for FMOD's to work properly.

e.g. In the SBLive's EAX Control Panel, set the Audio Effects type in the dropdown box to "(No Effects)".

swaaye wrote:

One great tweak for Unreal that works with just about any PCI sound card is to open up Unreal.ini and set the audio sample rate to 48000 Hz instead of the default of 22050 Hz. Massive improvement in sound quality. It takes a bit more CPU oomph though.

Apparently Unreal does have A3D 2.0 support. You have to turn on that ambiguous "Use3DHardware" audio option. I've tried that with a SBLive, which has A3D 1.0 support, but it's pretty buggy. I would guess that it would work a lot better on a Vortex chip.

Just wanted to bump these great tips and to say thanks for them. I can really notice a 3D effect now in Unreal. Take about 1 FPS off my framerate (1GHz P3 / Ti4600 / AU8830), so the difference is negligible.