Creative cards should always "just work" and have good game support. The Vortex 2 is interesting if you want to check out the 3D functionality.

Vortex 2. Solely because the user interface on the drivers are so much better designed. Creative = clutter and more clutter

Personally I also think A3D is better than the first iterations of EAX.

My experience has been that a vortex 2 card simply won't work with my PIII setup, where a Live! works like a charm. As mentioned the Live! drivers install a lot of crap by default, but there is a "driver only" option.

EAX 1/2 is only a reverb engine. It is just the EMU10K1's MIDI effects DSP processing wave output (a new feature of EMU10K1). The 3D audio functions used with EAX are DirectSound3D. There are a few games that use EAX in nice ways, like NFS 3 & 4, where a Live! or Audigy gives the best experience. Vortex 2's EAX emulation is unfinished and poor.

The ideal EAX choice is an Audigy 1/2 because they have higher quality front speaker output than Live. It is also important with both Audigy and Live to use the VXD drivers. That means you must use Win9x. The WDM drivers tend to be quirky with 9x games.

But definitely have a Vortex 2 around for the games that use A3D. Even a Vortex 1 sounds excellent for those A3D 1.x games. Vortex cards can only be used with Win9x because the 2k/XP drivers are unfinished and lack features.

When I tried Live! with the EAX patch in UT some effects sounded really muffled (with headphones, no fancy speaker setup). Is it supposed to be like that or is A3D better? I really have zero experience with 3D sound aside from that, may get into it sometime 😀

Yeah, that's kind of what I'm hoping to do here. I never bothered with this fancy 3D audio stuff growing up. Had no clue what any of it was. Now, I get the chance to experience it for the first time. I have both cards, and I have 2 machines that need them. I'm probably going to be using some cheapo headphones or a cheapo pair of desktop speakers for these, so for now, it's not that important I guess.

I was mostly just wondering which one to use for which time period.

What I hate about it is that Creative is largely the company that's behind all of it; or was, until Microsoft screwed EAX by killing DS3D and everything switched to OpenAL. They're such a great company since the DOS days (SBPro "support" in SB16/AWE, bug free wavetable headers) until now where they are far worse than AMD when it comes to killing support for "obsolete" cards and backwards compatibility...

The SB Live! with EAX and a surround speaker system sounded pretty damn good in its day. I still have the Cambridge Soundworks DTT2500 I bought to compliment the soundcard. Until I upgraded my machine, it used to be hooked up via the DIN output.

Creative's software team seemed to have changed dramatically around 1999ish, right after the Live! came out. I remember LiveWare! 1.0 (which came with my original 1998 card and supported 9x/NT 4.0 only) had the same look and feel as their popular ISA software packages. It also had that stupid LiveWare! toolbar thing. After that things seemed to go downhill, and every major OS release resulted in a several month wait for full-feature drivers and tools.

Vista's audio stack changes didn't go over well with Creative either. EAX was way too embedded in the whole DS3D setup and they never really exploited OpenAL. Somehow other direct hardware audio APIs like ASIO managed to escape the same fate.

d1stortion wrote:

When I tried Live! with the EAX patch in UT some effects sounded really muffled (with headphones, no fancy speaker setup). Is it supposed to be like that or is A3D better? I really have zero experience with 3D sound aside from that, may get into it sometime 😀

I always had problems with EAX in Unreal. Although if you use the OldUnreal patches there are new audio engines (OpenAL, FMOD) that probably work better than the stock Galaxy audio engine.

Unreal shipped with A3D 1.x support. At some point a patch added A3D 2.0. The last official version should support A3D 2.0.