Look up PDFs for the various audio chips.

PSC705 is Seismic Edge and it uses the VLSI Thunderbird ASIC that most definitely has 3D audio acceleration.

My old Yamaha YMF724 PCI card passes the DirectX 3D hardware audio test... I'm guessing this means it actually supports 3D audio via hardware? Try running the sound test through DXdiag to see if any of those cards use hardware buffers.

Some drivers simulate hardware buffers. Realtek does that for example.

Don't know about Trident, FM801 does it in software, Philips 60x/70x series are HW, and Terratec DMX has an ESS Canyon3D chip which has hardware acceleration as well.
Crystal 4630 was used in several high end cards from Terratec (SiXPack5.1) and Turtle Beach. There is another Terratec card (DMX XFire1024) which uses it's little brother 4624.
Theoretically, all CS46xx cards are supposed to have H/W acceleration.
My IBM Thinkpad 600E has a CS4610 onboard, but that laptop is still in testing and I did not played any hame with positional audio on it. I also have a card with 4614 which needs more testing.

Let me reiterate that there are PDFs for many old hardware bits available online. 😁

http://alsa.cybermirror.org/manuals/trident/4dwave_dx.pdf
http://www.p4c.philips.com/files/p/psc705_20/ … _20_pss_eng.pdf
http://alsa.cybermirror.org/manuals/forte_med … 801-AU-Data.PDF

CS4630
http://www.datasheetcatalog.org/datasheets2/53/539434_1.pdf

The name Terratec DMX seems to include several different card designs. I see the 6fire with a VIA Envy24 chip and that has no acceleration.

Thanks for all your comments, I have come to similar conclusions. Unfortunately, the datasheets are not always clear to me on what *exactly* the cards do in hardware. The FM801 tells me something about "3D positional Audio" using "host based signal processing", so is this just another word for "software-driven 3D audio"?
The 4DWave and the DMX (Maestro 2E version) also claim to do some 3D audio in hardware including reverb effects, but I was not able to hear any effects in games so far.
I also tested the cards with the "Rightmark 3D audio Positioning Accuracy test" program:
- Soundfusion based cards have 3D audio with effects (EAX2 ?)
- Seismic edge card has 3D audio + effects, but lacks occlusion support with WDM drivers
- Yamaha Waveforce: also has 3D + effects
- 4DWave: no idea about 3D audio (claims to have DS3D support), but no effects
I didn't test the FM801 and the Maestro2E yet.

4Dwave sounds like it has a combination of hardware and software 3D processing. Others like Vortex 2 do that too.

FM801 sounds like ESS Solo1 in that it is a PCI chip tailored To DOS games and basic Windows audio. Real FM synthesizer is nice. Host processing means system CPU. 3D by a software library.

And yea sometimes cards didnt get fully featured WDM drivers. You usually want to use VXD drivers for best results. WDM tends to be slower, missing features and may even sound incorrect with old games.

Maestro 2E does well in Win9x. I played some Jedi Knight on a notebook with it and was impressed with its A3D 1.0 support.

Now the Maestro works as well with effects.

swaaye wrote:

And yea sometimes cards didnt get fully featured WDM drivers. You usually want to use VXD drivers for best results. WDM tends to be slower, missing features and may even sound incorrect with old games.

Confirmed :-)
Unfortunately, the PSC705 doesn't seem to like ISA sound cards when using the VXD drivers. It caused bluescreens with my EWS64 and disabled the SB16 part of my AWE64 as well. Looks like crappy drivers to me...

My PSC703 works well with WDM drivers. Is interesting, with VXD I had no SB emulation, yet it works with WDM. Quite the opposite of SB Live.