marxveix wrote on Yesterday, 11:33:There are many drivers, what driver version is good for ES1370 in Win9x? […]
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There are many drivers, what driver version is good for ES1370 in Win9x?
https://archive.org/details/ensoniq-audiopci-drivers
https://archive.org/details/audio-pci-by-enso … 00-installation
https://archive.org/details/creative-sound-bl … io-pci-software
Mystery card here is cheap Ensoniq and it does not give great result by these bencmark results, was it es1370,es1371 or es1373, i dont know.
https://www.philscomputerlab.com/best-sound-c … r-socket-7.html
Super interesting and he is right in comments (e.g. ES1370 does processing in software) but there shouldn't be any processing in the test - the card should be just pulling pre-processed wavs. It would be interesting to compare Microsoft basic drivers.
If Phil installed extra sound softwares that add-on system capabilities instead of just the basic INF, I'd ask why the **** do that?
I remember the Creative Labs control panel had binaural setup to output 3D sound from stereo inputs streams on stereo speakers - educational, but that is all software processing that would theoretically work with any sound card and would be best disabled for FPS. Creative's installer probably unpacks a load of other stuff (luxury software wave tables, visually appealing mixers, etc.) for Windows to load into main system memory on startup and forever eat CPU cycles - and the most mature Creative Labs drivers will unlock all the routes to exercise those extra software routines!
I always did wonder why Creative was investing in software for a product line they were shutting down, and I assumed at the time it was actually to lead people like me towards buying the SB Live that could deliver similar capabilities but with hardware acceleration.
Phil also mentioned A3D, but failed to distinguish between software A3D and hardware A3D. If you throw A3D or EAX at an ES1370 then that will translate into extra CPU cycles and more cache spills - hammering FPS. If you throw both A3D and EAX at an ES1370, you should expect your CPU to crawl.
And, if you are running benchmarks to compare 3D sound then Aureal Vortex (original) cards would be the most interesting baseline because developers probably targeted the original instead of the rare Aureal Vortex 2.0 - and we need to see settings to know which 3D features were active in the tests.
What Phil has done is test software stacks - and it shows us that Creative Labs shipped Ensoniq hardware with software capabilities that the cards cannot accelerate.
We can assume all the benchmark results reflect a vendor's default software settings - but there is no record of what those defaults are. Phil hasn't done any hardware testing. It looks like Phil may have tested some cards without A3D enabled, some cards with A3D enabled, and not identified which of those cards are doing A3D in software.
Phil has provided an interesting list of cards for someone to test against the Aureal Vortex (original), which is the hardware that aligns best with Quake 3's A3D features. In that test, it would be good to see ES1370 results with A3D (slow) and without A3D (fast). And before someone starts, I think they should decide how they are going to tackle software EAX (slow) that Quake3 won't explicitly activate but that OS/drivers might.
