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FAQs: Vortex 2 Technical Support FAQ Vortex 2
Currently, these are the cards that use the Vortex 2 chipset:
At this time, Dell, Sony, Compaq, Samsung, and Packard Bell Europe all build systems that feature true A3D. Since new models are constantly added, and model numbers often change, please check with your system vendor for A3D compatibility.
There are many new features of Vortex 2:
The Vortex 2 still has many of the same features that made the Vortex 1 chipset such a superb product:
Reference drivers are basic drivers written by Aureal for their Vortex chipsets. Based on these reference drivers, board manufacturers create drivers for their sound cards. In most cases, you should always use your manufacturer’s drivers; however, since the reference drivers will always be the latest, you may want to use the reference driver if it fixes a problem that you’ve been experiencing. You may lose out on any additional functionality incorporated into the manufacturer’s drivers. One thing to keep in mind, though, is that Aureal will not provide support for you and your use of their drivers. It is still up to your sound card manufacturer to provide you with support, and they may not support you if you are not using their drivers. To download our reference drivers, you can visit our driver download page: http://www.a3d.com/html/download/drivers/
Most likely this is a result of a previous sound card installed on your system. Some newer sound cards provide a "fake" A3D.DLL file in order to emulate A3D. The problem is that their uninstall programs do not remove this file and leave it on your hard drive. When your A3D card’s installation program copies over files, it sees that there is already an A3D.DLL file on the system and if its newer, leaves it there. You can solve this by simply copying the A3D.DLL from your manufacturer’s CD (or Aureal's reference drivers) over to your Windows System folder, overwriting the one currently there. That should solve A3D initialization problems.
This is a bug in the wavetracing demo where it reports this error erroneously. Reflections will still be enabled, and the demo will run as designed. You can safely ignore this error if you are running on any Vortex 2-based card.
There are different ways to answer this question. 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
There is currently an issue that occurs where the bass output dramatically drops only when the sound card is in quad mode. This problem is only exhibited with a few speaker systems; users have confirmed the following models:
Aureal is aware of this issue and it has been corrected in all driver releases since the 2030 beta drivers. If you have not already done so, upgrade to the latest drivers.
Quad mode is used when you have 4 speakers, to address each speaker independently. The 2 speaker modes also send output to all 4 speakers, but the sound is just duplicated; everything that plays out the front left speaker will play out the rear left speaker – everything that plays out the front right speaker will play out the rear right speaker. 2-speaker modes are useful if you want to have two people listening to headphones and hearing the same thing.
On the Vortex 2-based products, only one input can be selected at a time. To ensure that the correct input is selected, double click on the mixer icon (yellow speaker) in the System Tray. Select Options | Properties | Recording, then click OK. This is the Recording portion of the mixer. Select the input you wish by checking its box at the bottom of the volume slider. Adjust the slider to the desired recording level.
The only game controller known not to work is the Thrustmaster Rage 3D. This is due to their driver, and unfortunately, cannot be fixed from Aureal's end. Aureal will continue to work with game controller manufacturers to ensure the highest level of compatibility with their products.
By default, the wavetable header volume is muted. We will be correcting this beginning with the 4.06.2030 reference drivers. If you are using drivers older than these, double click on the mixer icon (yellow speaker) in the System Tray. Select Options | Properties | Playback. In the "Show the following volume controls:" box, make that sure that the wavetable header is selected – it will be the option marked "MPU-401", "VIDEO", or "Ext. Wavetable" depending on the drivers you are using. Once you have checked the box, click the OK button. You will now see a new slider on the mixer for it; remove the check from the Mute checkbox on it, and adjust the slider to the desired volume.
Currently, these inputs are routed directly to the codec on the sound card, bypassing the Vortex 2 chipset completely. This was done to provide the best possible signal quality. A side effect of this is that the audio will only play out the front speakers. If you are in quad mode, sound from these sources will come from the front speakers. If you are in any other mode, then the sound will play from all 4 speakers since in these modes sound is just duplicated.
If you are using Norton Anti-Virus and its boot time program, try moving the two programs far away from each other. In your AUTOEXEC.BAT file, move the Norton Anti-Virus program (usually called NAV.COM) to the very start of the file, and the AU30DOS.COM file to the very end of the file. This should resolve any lock ups.
There are two ways to do this – before and after the drivers are installed. Before the drivers are installed, copy the drivers to a directory on your hard drive. Load the AU30MMED.INF file in WordPad or Notepad. Navigate down to this section of the file: [AspenOverides.Addreg]. Remove the semi-colon from the line ;HKR,Config,DisableSBFM,1,1 so that it reads HKR,Config,DisableSBFM,1,1 Save the file and exit. Now when you install the drivers, the driver will load but not be initialized and will not use any resources. Sound Blaster emulation will not work. If you already have the drivers installed, you can still disable Sound Blaster emulation via Device Manager. Right click on the My Computer icon on your desktop and select Properties. Click on the Device Manager tab, and then double click on Sound, video, and game controllers to open that section up. Double click on the Sound Blaster Pro emulation listing. On the General tab, check the box that disables the device. A restart is necessary for this to take effect.
We are not sure why this is occurring, but it is a known issue. It does not in any way affect the performance of your sound card; all Vortex 2-based sound cards fully support DLS (Level 1).
This information taken and modified from the excellent document available here: http://www.zefiro.com/vgakills.txt A good number of VGA card manufacturers are squeezing out a few extra points on their benchmarking scores by locking up the PCI bus. This is fine for graphics and most systems on the PC (hard disks and such) don't even notice the problem.... Unfortunately this can hurt the audio system in a big way. Most audio cards use ISA/DMA to trickle samples over the bus one word at a time. Even PCI cards can be hurt by this problem because they trickle the data over the bus in tiny transfers. When another device illegally locks up the bus for more than 1/88200th of a second, there's a good chance you will lose audio samples resulting an a glitch in the recording or playback. This glitching can appear in the form of brief, silent pauses in the sound, as well as crackling or popping sounds. This is NOT the fault of the sound card! This is not even the fault of the VGA card... it is in fact the fault of the VGA driver. For more information on this, and ways to look into fixing it, be sure to read the entire article at the link above.
The default wavetable sound bank (a file named AU30GM.ARL) is kept in your Windows System folder. To use a different wavetable sound bank as default, simply rename the current one to something different (such as AUREAL.ARL) and then copy the sound bank you wish to become the default in to the Windows System folder. Rename it AU30GM.ARL and when you reboot, it will now load the new one as the default.
Launch the Aureal Control Panel and click on the MIDI tab. Clicking on the Download button will open a dialog box which will allow you to select the wavetable set to load. The Vortex 2-based cards currently support DLS (Level 1) and ARL (Aureal native format) sound banks. You do not need to reboot to use the new sample bank; the change takes effect immediately.
Currently, there is not. The DLS (Level 1) standard does not put a limit on the overall size of the sound bank. Since the Aureal wavetable engine uses system RAM for storing samples, you will be limited to the amount of memory you have in your system. Keep in mind that other applications will need system memory as well; it is probably a good rule of thumb to never load a sample bank that is larger than half of your total system RAM.
There are some great shareware programs available to convert sound banks from one format to another. An early version of one of these programs (Audio Compositor) wrote the DLS files incorrectly, and it was the extraneous data in the file that caused Aureal's wavetable driver to crash. That program has corrected the problem on their end. You should contact the creator of the DLS file and ask them to convert the file again with a current program that writes DLS files correctly.
No, there is not. Aureal has no plans currently to release a patch editor for their chipsets. Vortex 1-based cards support DLS (Level 1) sound banks, and there are bank editors and conversion programs available that will allow you to create banks in DLS format. Awave is a great conversion tool that allows you the flexibility to convert almost any known sound bank format over to DLS. It also has advanced tools that rival many patch editors. Be sure to use version 5.0 or higher. http://hem.passagen.se/fmj/awmain.html Audio Compositor combines a MIDI file renderer and software wavetable synthesizer, integrated with a rich graphical environment for editing instrument samples and patches. Be sure to use version 3.2f or higher. http://www.eden.com/~mitchell/ Aureal does not support or endorse either of these programs, but they are great tools that will allow you to expand upon the functionality of your Vortex 1-based product.
Right click on My Computer and choose Properties. Click on the Device Manager tab. Double click on Sound, Video, and Game Controllers to open that section up. Double click on Sound Blaster Pro Emulation and check the "Disable in this hardware profile" box. Click OK, and reboot if prompted to. The next time you reboot, Sound Blaster emulation will be disabled (both in Windows and in Real Mode DOS).
Cards based on the Vortex 2 chipset feature a 10 band equalizer in place of simple bass and treble controls. The Equalizer can be found in your sound card’s Control Panel.
Not currently, but EAX support is planned for all Vortex 2-based cards during the first half of 1999.
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