Benchmark Results

Driver Revisions

It appears that the Montego II is using a modified set of the newest release drivers for the Vortex2, and not an implementation of the beta drivers. The beta drivers for the Vortex2 demonstrate significantly improved CPU utilization numbers under ZD Audio Winbench 99. Unfortunately, with the Turtle Beach Montego II, you will have to wait for Turtle Beach's version of the Aureal reference drivers. Installing the reference drivers will not work.

Thus, the high CPU utilizations are not a product of the Vortex2 chip, but rather a subject of driver maturity. The Vortex2 numbers were taken on a Videologic SonicStorm Vortex2.

One downfall w/ Audio Winbench is it shows higher CPU usage if a card polls the position of a moving object more frequently (e.g., if "card 1" relayed an object's position to the CPU every 1/1000 of a second, and "card 2 "only did it every 1/500 of a second, "card 2" would get a better score although the representative numbers would be unusable. Right now, there is some question as to how many times an object is polled, and may be a fuction of specific card drivers or hardware. We'll keep you updated on 3D Audio Winbench scores!

System Specs

CPU: Celeron 450MHz
SonicStorm Vortex2

Vortex2 Beta Drivers v. 2030

Standard Drivers v. 2016

As you can see, the Montego II drivers perform consistently better than the release production drivers for Vortex2, a testament to the effort displayed by Turtle Beach engineers. However, the beta Vortex2 drivers released by Aureal (which work perfectly on all Vortex2 boards with the exception of the Montego II) are designed specifically to drastically reduce CPU usage and increase hardware-accelerated 3D audio streams, take the gold in all tests.

Turtle Beach works with current code provided by Aureal, and new low-utilization drivers are currently in the works, and will probably be released a few weeks after Aureal's official production driver update.