The Good
In the direct line of competition, DIAMOND
shows off the WORLD first A3D 2.0 card with support for 2 line-out function which is
similiar to CREATIVE's offering. This means that it will be able to support four speakers
surround effect with true surround to the Front left/right and Rear left/right. This stir
lots of interest here with this ultimate design. I have personally tested and tried this
advance technology and was amazed! DIAMOND MonsterSound MX300 is something special on its
own. With the wide DIAMOND support, enjoy world class audio playback with its 320-voice
capability which are fully upgradable to more in the near future. Comparing with the Live!
and YAMAHA top of the line WaveForce XG, what you get is unparallel quality sound. It is
hard to explain but A3D 2.0 is kind of special in it's way when you run the bundled games.
Even using the older A3D games like Battle Zone, you can still feel quite a bit of
different. A3D 2.0 is so new that the most of the current game titles does not seem to
support it. However, I can only foresee it to get BETTER support.
The new DIAMOND card will automatically detect the supported audio format when you
start running the game, be it either the near future A3D 2.0 games or the current A3D 1.0
games titles. A superb offering that CREATIVE cannot beat is it's ability to support
Environmental Audio Extension (EAX in short) in it's next driver revision. Diamond has
added on a connector (supported by the Vortex 2) that will allow the attachment of upgrade
cards. A couple of these are currently in the production phase. One being a basic S/PDIF
card and another being a full featured digital i/o card (including S/PDIF) that also
allows full 5.1 support to the MX300. The MX300 card will auto-detect what is connected to
it (along the lines of the MX200) hence simplifying setup (this is not a standard Vortex 2
feature).
The Vortex 2 and hence the MX300 can
support EAX in hardware through a driver revision. This is possible as EAX is a reverb API
and the Vortex 2 will handle EAX style reverb by doing the computationally intensive tasks
of sample rate conversion and mixing in hardware, and the memory intensive task of running
the reverb filters and delay lines on the host (using main memory and the host CPU).
However, it is likely that this support will not come by until the next revision of the
EAX which is being worked on at the Interactive Audio Special Interest Group;
A3D 2.0 will check for A3D 2.0 certified hardware. If it finds it, all A3D 2.0 features
will be enabled. If it does not find it, then the features will be scaled down to what the
hardware can handle. Games that only support A3D 2.0 will still allow for hardware
accelerated 3D positional audio on cards like the Sound Blaster Live! However, my
understanding is that A3D 2.0 will not activate any dynamic reverb on the Live.
Changing gears in mid-development is not an easy process so expect games that have been in
development for some time to stick to A3D 1.x (eg. Thief: The Dark Project is slated to
support A3D 1.x (as well as EAX)). Titles like Half Life and Heretic II will have A3D 2.0
support. However, with any new API, initial support goes through a learning curve at the
developer level. This will be true for EAX and A3D 2.0. Early titles like Half Life may
only take the A3D 2.0 API and the Vortex 2 hardware to about 50 percent of its limits;
Half Life is slated to have both A3D 2.0 and EAX so we will have a great platform for
comparisons. Unreal is also slated to get A3D 2.0 but as we all know EPIC has other
priorities right now.
And not forgetting the AC-3 function which were widely spead. Basically, this card allow
playback of your AC-3 sound using it's digital I/O function. This is similar to CREATIVE's
but is yet to be available. |
Part 5 : SoundBlaster Live!