All about Aureal's technology including the APIs (A3D 1.0, 2.0, 3.0), sound cards, chips (including the Vortex 2 and Motorola DSP), speakers and anything else you can think of with respect to Aureal's technology. For support questions check out our support FAQ.
The first is in regards to the Ziff Davis 3D Audio Benchmarks. With Aureal's latest reference drivers, Vortex 2-based products will benchmark with approximately the same performance or slightly better performance as the SB Live! when the number of channels is 16 or lower in 4 speaker mode or even with 32 channels in 2 speaker or headphone mode. In four speaker mode the numbers get very different when 32 3D streams are used. This is because the SB Live! currently supports 32 3D audio streams in hardware, whereas the Vortex 2-based products do not when 4 speakers are enabled. For example of benchmarking results comparing the Vortex 2 to other sound cards you can check out our ZD Audio Benchmark page.
The second way to answer this question is in regards to A3D 2.0 games. Aureal’s new wavetracing technology takes the geometry of the room passed to the graphics adapter, and parses it into useful data that our audio engine can use to render realistic reflections and occlusions. While much of this is done on the Vortex 2 hardware, some computational work is done by the host. Aureal is committed to reducing the amount of CPU time needed. They have already made improvements and will continue to optimize where they can to produce the best sounding audio with the least possible host usage. They will also work closely with game developers to help them optimize their code in regards to A3D 2.0. Their goal is for minimal CPU usage when our geometry engine is used. You can see the results of this progress in our A3D 2.0 Performance Article. - Updated: November 29, 1999
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