Aureal Vortex 2 Unofficial Support/Driver pages

The Vortex 2 support/driver pages covers all soundcards that use the now discontinued Vortex 2 (AU8830) chip.  The boards that used the Vortex2 chip were Aureal's Vortex 2 SuperQuad Digital PCI (OEM), Aureal Vortex 2 PCI (OEM), Aureal's SQ2500,    Absolute Multimedia Outrageous 3D Sound, Diamond Monster Sound II MX300, Turtle Beach Montego II, Turtle Beach's Montego II Plus, Turtle Beach's Quadzilla, Turtle Beach's Home Studio, VideoLogic's SonicVortex2, Terratec's XLerate Pro, Xitel's Storm Platinum, I/O Magic's MagicWave V2 and several motherboards.

The designer and driver developer for this chip, Aureal, has ceased to exist. Creative Technology announced on September 21, 2000 that they would buy substantially all of the assets of Aureal Semiconductor, Inc., including patents, trademarks and other intellectual property. Creative Labs  Craig McHugh last year said in an interview done by MaximumPC made it clear that Creative only bought the intellectual property not the liability. That is they will not sell, support or develop drivers for  Aureal products. Quite similar to the deal between Nvidia and 3dfx. Craig also said that Aureal has retained contractors to finish a set of drivers for Aureal based cards. However several months has now passed without seen any new driver release which makes us believe their won't be any more driver release for this chip. VideoLogic also late last year issued the following statement on their website

"Aureal Inc., the designers and manufacturers of the Vortex2 chipset used on this card, have filed chapter 7 in the US, and are no longer trading or developing drivers for this chipset. As a result no further SonicVortex2 driver updates are possible. Windows 9x and NT drivers are complete, stable and bug-free. However Windows 2000 drivers are available in beta form only, and will not be developed further"

As VideoLogic says the current Win9x drivers works well with most games that support DS3D or A3D. However the EAX 1.0 support is limited (only works well with some games)  and there is no support for EAX 2.0. It's also doubtful how it will work with DS3D games that take advantage of new features in future versions of DirectX. The Windows 2000 WDM drivers are beta form and cause problem on many systems but at least on some systems they work fairly well for DS3D and A3D 1.0 games while A3D 2.0 support is more limited. The drivers also lacks EAX 1.0 support. If you use WindowsME we suggest you try the VXD drivers and not the WDM drivers.

When it comes to the upcoming WindowsXP some good news recently appeared in form of a video clip where one MS rep had the following to say: 

There's one thing I can't tell you about, except that its an audio card. You might be able to guess what company was bought from another company recently. Um, we've actually had to go and get the source code to, and we're doing the things to actually to ... we're doing the investment to get that, that driver up to the right levels, because ... it doesn't meet the bars that we've set for it today, and it doesn't meet our stress stuff. It doesn't meet all the quality bars that we expect of our drivers. And we just gotta keep hammering and hammering and hammering.

You can find the full video clip on Vortex of Sound. You can also check out this thread from the Vortex of Sound Forum on the same topic. Last word I've seen is that WindowsXP is not shipping with full featured Vortex2 drivers. Now when Windows XP is released we know the rumour was accurate but still not of quite the quality some may have hoped. More details available on the Windows XP/2000 page below.

With the exception of Turtle Beach's cards where you lose bracket functionality if you use the reference drivers all other Vortex2 cards can use reference drivers without losing any functionality. This also means you can download drivers from one of the other Vortex2 board makers except Turtle Beach if your board makers doesn't offer the latest release.

For more detailed info about the current drivers as well as download links check out our Windows 9x, WindowsNT, WindowsME or Windows XP/2000 Vortex2 support pages.

Sound Card Reviews

Audigy Detailed Impressions

Hurricane Extreme Initial Review

Hercules GameTheater XP

Philips Acoustic Edge

SoundBlaster Live! reference review

SoundBlaster Live! Platinum 5.1 European Edition

SoundBlaster Live! Platinum 5.1 America's Edition

Sound Blaster Live! Player 5.1

SoundBlaster Live! MP3+ 5.1

Sound Blaster Live! X-Gamer 5.1

FM801 reference review

Mushroom Siren Audio I

Abit AU10

Best Data Theatrix

Turtle Beach SantaCruz

VideoLogic SonicFury

Hoontech SoundTrack Digital-XG

Boostaroo Headphone Amplifier / Splitter

Sound Blaster Live!Drive I and II

Sound Blaster Creative Digital I/O 2

Spectrum Research Theater 2000

Qsound UltraQ

More reviews