Nice writeup, I would also be interested in seeing how the Santa Cruz fairs, it's a great card and does full Sensaura acceleration. As well as the SoundStorm DSP on Nforce2 motherboards.

There are also a few things to consider when benching the Aureal cards against others in an A3D game. A3D's WaveTracing is all calculated on the CPU using intels NSP signal processing library and MMX technology, it also was written almost entirely in ASM, but it does incur quite a bit of overhead. The other soundcards cannot render the reflections and will be doing "less work" all in all, including EAX.

The best form of comparison would be with DS3D games which each of these cards support, and remove the proprietary API's from the mix and see how well each cards Hardware Buffers handle the workload.

archsan wrote:

Nice graphs! The WDM vs VXD comparison is particularly useful for reference. 😀

soviet conscript wrote:

I read somewhere the SQ2500 which uses the Aureal Vortex2 A3D chip is slightly faster then other cards that use the Vortex chip.

Maybe ones with the later revision B0 you mean? That's what I read from one of ZanQuance's threads here as well.

These stalls were fixed in the B0 revision and thus a 12% improvement for reflections which are piped through the WaveTable cell of the chip.
However these stalls won't occur if you place the WT access lower in the VDB Work to do table, so the A2 can be just as fast as the B0 if consideration was made in the drivers.
Because this is the only difference that I've seen of this chip, I no longer see any real advantage to the B0 revision and think the A2 is just as good.

ZanQuance wrote:

There are also a few things to consider when benching the Aureal cards against others in an A3D game. A3D's WaveTracing is all calculated on the CPU using intels NSP signal processing library and MMX technology, it also was written almost entirely in ASM, but it does incur quite a bit of overhead. The other soundcards cannot render the reflections and will be doing "less work" all in all, including EAX.

The best form of comparison would be with DS3D games which each of these cards support, and remove the proprietary API's from the mix and see how well each cards Hardware Buffers handle the workload.

The Vortex 2 still came out on top 😀

What's a good Direct Sound 3D game? Remember it has to:

- Run well enough on a SS7 machine, nobody wants to see charts at 15 fps
- Have built in benchmarking capability

Another thing that occurred to me is the sample rate that GLQuake uses. Is it 44.1 KHz and 16 bit? Got to look into that.

Unreal of course! 😉

*next reply better have a gif of M.Bison

[edit]Quake defaulted to 22khz, GLQuake might have changed it to 44.1
correction, Quake1 is 11kHz, if anything GLQuake might be 22kHz

ZanQuance wrote:

Unreal of course! 😉

*next reply better have a gif of M.Bison

[edit]Quake3 defaulted to 22khz, GLQuake3 might have changed it to 44.1

Oh, I thought that game uses A3D as well? I remember hearing the start-up sound.

Sorry meant Quake1 not 3, but 3 "also" defaulted to 22khz

Triple correction, it appears that Quake1 was 11kHz not 22...hmmm my memory seems to be going bad
[edit]From what I can find GLQuake is also 11kHz

[edit2 because triple posting is taboo]Descent3 also supports Glide, DS3D, A3D 2.0, and EAX2 and has a built in benchmark feature, plus it saturates the audio channels pretty well. *BUT* I am not sure how well it would run on a K6-III, might be fine actually.

Bugger, yes that's very low.

EDIT:

Yea Descent will likely run quite poorly. There are quite a few games with options to select the audio render. But they are all newer and don't do well on the K6. Incoming does have an option to disable 3D Audio though, so I could have used that.

Now was Direct Sound 3D that established? I always thought that took off a bit later.

So yea, not perfect, but the way I see it is that the Vortex 2 sounds best in A3D games AND performs well too.

EDIT EDIT: Quake 3 also only supports either 11 or 22 KHz and 16 or 8 bit.

ZanQuance wrote:

WT.JPG

These stalls were fixed in the B0 revision and thus a 12% improvement for reflections which are piped through the WaveTable cell of the chip.
However these stalls won't occur if you place the WT access lower in the VDB Work to do table, so the A2 can be just as fast as the B0 if consideration was made in the drivers.

Thanks for clarifying. Has this been done in any of the official drivers?

archsan wrote:

Thanks for clarifying. Has this been done in any of the official drivers?

Not that I've seen, the list looks like this in the card: (Taken from my debug control panel)

See how the WaveTable (WT) left channel access transfers are second and third in the list? These should be pushed down in the chain so that WaveTable isn't touched until after the fourth todo link.
No biggie, it's not like it gives "that" much performance increase all in all.
It's a simple fix but the current Aureal drivers will overwrite the changes whenever a new sound is playing.

PhilsComputerLab wrote:

Now was Direct Sound 3D that established? I always thought that took off a bit later.

Back to DX6, I think it was good enough at this release. I know Aureal only coded the drivers for DX6 features and weren't around for the later releases. DX8 audio changes were made for the original X-BOX features, so I think the SoundStorm makes use of DX8 audio changes. I'll look into the SDKs again and see what the additions were exactly.

Rightmark had a DS3D cpu usage benchmark test, so that might be a nice one to try.

I prefer testing real games. DX6, well that is pretty much perfect for the SS7 platform. Even those can be too demanding like Forsaken, Expendable and Descent III. Not sure about Forsaken, but Expendable and Descent III support A3D. A LOT of games from that time support A3D actually, even Quake III, which doesn't actually support EAX according to a quick Google search.

So yea, on the SS7 platform I think it doesn't matter that later EAX versions are not supported, those games won't run well at all.

But this is something I can add into the conclusion. I'm still looking for a game that uses a higher sample rate and 16 bit, I can add that to the GLQuake results to see the difference. And maybe some EAX game would be nice also.

EDIT: Descent III might be worth it after all. It supports Glide, which should help performance and apparently EAX 2 as well as A3D.

PhilsComputerLab wrote:

I prefer testing real games.

I know you just said that, but at least one of the 3dmark benchmarks has a "with and without audio" portion of their benchmark. I seem to remember it being a WW2 flight sim style benchmark.

3DMark03 I think. There is a scene with planes at the end. Much too new of a benchmark though.

PhilsComputerLab wrote:

EDIT: Descent III might be worth it after all. It supports Glide, which should help performance and apparently EAX 2 as well as A3D.

I read a few reviews and apparently it runs pretty well on K6-2's, I've always tested it on beefier systems, my DOS/98 rigs 440BX, P3-550, TNT2/M64 chews through it no problem with A3D 2.0
I think it required DX8 to be installed though, need to grab my CD's and read the readme...
[edit]Okay nope, it requires DX6 and runs fine with it.
Be sure to also get the 1.4 patch as it fixes numerous things in the game.

Other soundcards i have that it might work (i think) are:
Creative Soundblaster AWE64 ISA (standard/value)
Creative Soundblaster PCI128
Ensoniq Audio PCI3000 and 5200
Aztech 2320
Yamaha YMF719S ISA

I'd be interested to see how an Envy24 based card stacks up. It's not for 3D audio, but it's a good processor.

Then there are USB sound cards... Extigy?

Wow, the Audigy LS sucks! I have one in my Voodoo2 machine, guess I should swap it out, I should have a Live! or an Audigy 2 ZS somewhere that I could use instead. I also never knew about the WDM vs VXD drivers; is there an easy way to check which version is installed?

Yup, click on Start > Run > DXDIAG

Then go to the Sound or Audio tab and it will show it there 😀

Guys, I'm planning a follow up to this. I'm looking for a game that:

- Runs well enough on SS7
- Has some sort of benchmarking built in
- Supports high fidelity audio like 44 KHz and 16 bit

I know Quake III does 22 KHz and 16 bit, but it runs a bit slow for my liking.

An alternative could be a mod / sound replacement of GLQuake, but I'm not sure if the engine actually supports higher sampled sounds...

ioQuake3 does.

PhilsComputerLab wrote:

Yup, click on Start > Run > DXDIAG […]
Show full quote

Yup, click on Start > Run > DXDIAG

Then go to the Sound or Audio tab and it will show it there 😀

Guys, I'm planning a follow up to this. I'm looking for a game that:

- Runs well enough on SS7
- Has some sort of benchmarking built in
- Supports high fidelity audio like 44 KHz and 16 bit

I know Quake III does 22 KHz and 16 bit, but it runs a bit slow for my liking.

An alternative could be a mod / sound replacement of GLQuake, but I'm not sure if the engine actually supports higher sampled sounds...

Unreal perhaps?

Only thing I don't know is about the sound Unreal supports, but Unreal has both other options I think.

Dunno if it runs too slow for your liking on ss7, but for me it ran well enough for sure. And it's a well known game.

But I do admit I am kinda a big fan of Unreal 😊

I seem to remember the Old Unreal mod patch supports more sound options, including OpenAL.