Aureal
Vortex2 SQ2500 Quad PCI review
Posted by Adam
Klein on February 15, 2000
Company: Aureal
Product: Vortex2
SQ2500 Quad PCI soundcard
 Aureal
has brought us some very good audio chips over the past
couple of years. The first Vortex audio cards were a big hit
and the Vortex 2 proved to be even better, but what makes
them so great? The true 3D audio is what makes them special.
Other boards based on
different chips may say they offer 3D audio, but that is not
true 3D audio actually. These boards simply position the
audio in space, while Aureal Vortex chips examine the
geometry of a 3D world and reflects the audio accordingly.
This form of wavetracing is
what makes the true 3D audio processing of the Vortex so
great. With my
previous review of the Aureal Vortex SuperQuad (OEM
distribution only – though first Aureal own soundcard in
the market), I really liked the sound quality it gave me in
3D games, actually it was superior to the Sound Blaster Live
in that area.
There was something about it
that I really didn’t like though. That was the huge CPU
utilization the card required to run both Aureal A3D API and
just playing normal sound. I am very happy to say that the
Aureal Vortex 2 SQ2500 has an improved design to combat
this. The CPU utilization has gone way done and as a matter
of fact, beats the Sound Blaster Live in CPU utilization
when playing normal sound, more details in the next pages…
Installation and Drivers
Installation of the board
was pretty easy since the amount of resources the board used
was almost equal to that of the previous board in my system,
the Sound Blaster Live. The drivers that came with the board
worked really well and I didn’t have any problems with my
Pentium 3 Coppermine CPU.
The Sound Blaster Live, on
the other hard, required me to download Liveware! 3 again in
order for it to work with my Coppermine. The drivers may be
good for the Vortex, but there are things missing in them
that were previously mentioned to be in them a long time
ago. One of them being EAX support (Environmental Audio
Support).
EAX
is one of the driving forces behind Creative and their Sound
Blaster Live line of cards. I hear that EAX support has been
in beta for a long long time, but has failed to be seen as
an official driver release. It is unknown as of yet if the
soon to be released drivers will contain support for board
EAX version 1 and EAX version 2, or just EAX version 1. If
the support is only in EAX 1, then there will be a whole lot
of EAX games that will not be supported by the driver.
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