Current Sound Cards

Ah, the Memories

In general, the PC platform was an embarrassment compared to other uber-gaming machines such as the Amiga (if I had $600 to spend! ARGH! :/ ) Still, after Wing Commander II came another major success that found an ever better way to use sound - Doom. Oh baby. Back in ye olden days when there was no sound, playing doom with a Sound Blaster Pro was simply amazing. A totally thrilling experience which I'll never forget. The grunting of the demons and the pig-things... ugh.

Sorry, I'm getting a bit nostalgic here. OK, so we've established how Creative made itself into the sound superpower, and how it held onto that status (Basically compatibility with games was the big deal. That, and a slow implementation of features into new cards - more voices, MIDI (the AWE series), etc.). With the dawn of Win95 (a black day in human history), came DirectSound which leveled the playing field for sound cards. Suddenly, any game developed for Windows 95 would work with any sound card that had DirectX drivers. While Win95 games tended to be slower than their DOS counterparts, compatibility won out. (The MechWarrior 2 series is a perfect example.)

Revolution Time!

A few years back, a little company called Aureal came onto the scene with a *gasp* *shock* PCI sound card. What do they need the power of PCI for in a sound card? All sound cards are ISA... well, unless they need to communicate with memory and the CPU at very high speeds. Why would they need that speed? To provide say ... 3D sound? That's right. What you were hearing in the theatres for years, and at insanely expensive home systems could come to your computer.

A3D, Aureal 3D, was the API of the Aureal Vortex chip based cards (Diamond Monster Sound MX200 was the most popular), and A3D logos suddenly appeared on boxes of games everywhere. The 3D sound effects, especially with a four speaker setup or headphones, was amazing. Creative, who had been simply rehashing old designs (AWE series) and putting them on PCI, with more voices, was caught flatfooted. Creative eventually bought E-mu Systems and leveraged E-mu's technology into the SBLive!. The SBLive! featured EAX, Creative's answer to A3D, but, by the time the SBLive! hit the shelves, Aureal already had a huge library of games featuring A3D support and had just released the second generation Vortex2 chip.

Aureal or Creative Labs?

Technically, the Aureal cards are more realistic than the Sound Blaster Live!, because the Aureal Vortex cards perform dynamic wavetracing effects. Also, the Aureal cards have the ability to (with proper drivers) do all the 3D effects that SBLive! can do, thanks to the incorporation of the SBLive's EAX API into DirectSound3D. However, Aureal hasn't released said drivers yet (probably a wise business decision on Aureal's part). Supporting EAX would encourage developers to only code for EAX just because it'll have support from both the SBLive! and the Vortex1/2. Even with A3D's huge lead, it seems like EAX is now in the lead with new game support, but Aureal scored an incredible win when id announced that Quake 3 Arena would support A3D.

At first, Aureal's drivers were vastly superior to the Creative drivers, but Creative Labs is very similar to EA (Electronic Arts). If it doesn't work the first time, it'll be solid within a few revisions. Right now, the SBLive! has Linux drivers, while no Aureal Vortex2 drivers exist yet (There are beta drivers for the original Vortex, and these weren't even done by Aureal.). For the common gamer, the SBLive! is the easiest choice, but hardcore gamers tend to stick with the Aureal cards.

Currently, the market is about even between the two, largely due to major price cuts in the Live! and Creative's sheer power in the market. This isn't to take away from the SBLive! at all, since it is an extremely solid product, more solid than the Vortex2, but with a few less features. The future promises to be interesting, with both the A3D 3.0 and EAX 2.0 APIs on the horizon. Aureal and Creative Labs are starting to overlap more and more in the features department, and are now in a desperate fight for developer support.