Monday, January 10, 2000

EAX for Q3A -- 9:23 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

A website called T-Break has posted instructions (supposedly from Creative Labs) on how to get Q3A to use EAX-based sound cards!. It seems that Aureal put out a patch that will allow non-Aureal cards to play A3D 2.0 titles using DirectSound (of which EAX is a superset). I may just have to try this. Caveat emptor, as always. Thanks Blue's News.

Update! I did a little more research and found out that this patch is indeed legitimate. I found a readme for the patch on Aureal's website as well as the patch itself. Cool beans!

I downloaded the Aureal patch, installed it, and ran some timedemos. I ran Reverend's "Pumped" demo and DEMO001 that comes with Quake III. Here are the results:

• Pumped w/o 3D sound: 30.3 fps; with 3D Sound: 24.6 fps (19% loss)
• DEMO001 w/o 3D sound: 46.6 fps; with 3D Sound: 38.2 fps (18% loss)

As you can see, enabling 3D sound causes a substantial framerate hit. Does it sound better? Quite a bit! Is it worth losing that many fps? For me, probably not. Download the Aureal patch and decide for yourself!

News for 01/10/2000

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