Reply 20 of 68, by ZanQuance
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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.
wrote:Nice graphs! The WDM vs VXD comparison is particularly useful for reference. 😀
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.