The Glade 4.0

I started messing around building computers under the supervision of my father back in 1996 and started playing an Atari 800 at age 1 (though I couldn't beat any of the games, of course).

Anyway, I was wondering, since 1996 I remember getting my first 3-D hardware accelerator. It was a PCI Riva-128 chipset based card. Then I got a Voodoo 2, 3Dfx's 800 lb gorilla in that day. Everyone knew 3Dfx's Voodoo lines were the strongest, and no one questioned this. We couldn't afford a Pentium or Pentium II, so we had an AMD K6-2 running @ 300 Mhz.

The Voodoo 3's came out and eventually, eventually NVidia, the big underdog (ATi RAGE Fury's were propreitary crap in this day, for prebuilt non-gaming machines and don't even mention the Savage S3) released their Riva TNT, and a new 32 bit chipset and the world was changed. Yeah, I remember getting that sweet Diamond Viper V550. The Voodoo 3 couldn't compete in quality, only having the edge in raw speed. The Voodoo 4 saw a continued malfeasence on 3Dfx's part and the Riva TNT2 chipset boards were dominating the market. Then ATi released their RADEON chipset, but it was too little too late, and couldn't compete with the GeForce 256. Eventually, the first incarnation of the GeForce v Radeon war that is ongoing today was born.

At the same time, AMD had the same problem as it's K6-2 and 3's couldn't compete with Intel's Pentium or even the lower performing Celeron. This eventually became the Atholon v. Pentium war.

My point is, after all these years, I remember all these different chipsets competing with each other, but I never saw anyone even challenge Creative’s Sound Blaster franchise. I remember some crappy Turtle Montego thing, a Hercules card (no idea what chipset) and Nvidia’s NForce board. But to this day, Sound Blaster remains the unchallenged king. Am I just out of the times?

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"It's real, grew up in trife life, the times of white lines
The hype vice, murderous nighttimes and knife fights invite crimes" - Nasir Jones

Don't forget Cyrix

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Holy shitsnacks!

Our K6-2 was an upgrade from a Cyris 150, lol. Wow, running Quake and DFII: Jedi Knight back in the day was painful.

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"It's real, grew up in trife life, the times of white lines
The hype vice, murderous nighttimes and knife fights invite crimes" - Nasir Jones

Auzentech has been doing well in the sound card market I believe. I know I've been happy with my model of theirs, although its an older one so Vista support was a bit shaky. Newer models fix that I'm told.

Good point. I can't recall ever having seriously considered buying anything else for my PC sound needs, or hearing anything else championed as a superior product. I can't even recall there ever having been a serious enough competitor to cause fanboism. It's like it's always been the only thing on the market.

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Go back to zero, take a pill, and get well ~ Lemmy Kilmister

And the funny part is, their products have always been reasonably priced. The Live! drive models I had w/ SPDIF and MIDI input/outputs were a bit more, but you could always get the to of the line card for like $100-150, or the previous generation for like $75. Not bad.

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"It's real, grew up in trife life, the times of white lines
The hype vice, murderous nighttimes and knife fights invite crimes" - Nasir Jones

I think realtek probably sells a lot more audio codec licenses than Creative. Almost every motherboard comes with them these days.

There are also much better sound devices than what creative sells. Just go shop for them on any music related website. Creative has it's niche in standalone gaming hardware, but my last few experiences with them were terrible (driver issues mainly), so I'm just using the on-board chipsets these days.

I remember one time there was a problem with SB Live and Everquest. I don't recall what all it was other than it made the game crash.

I paid 35 bucks for my last SB card. Four years later it is still working great.

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Raell Kromwell

Cyrix was cheap and it allowed me to play Diablo better than my 486 did. That's about all I can say about it.

Speaking of 3DFX's Voodoo 2... I am staring at one RIGHT NOW. I have my old one sitting on my work desk (close to an US Robotics ISDN modem). Wish I could find my Voodoo1 but that may be lost to the wind. Memories... like the corner of my mind....

As for Creative Labs, there were a lot of people that tried to compete but they just got dominated. CL made a decent product.

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Les Zombis et les Loups-Garous!

Remember that Voodoo 2 board that had two Voodoo 2's in SLI (true SLI, not like the boards today) in one, single board? But the board ended up being so huge that it blocked two PCI slots anyway.

Man, I love pre-2000 computer engineering.

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"It's real, grew up in trife life, the times of white lines
The hype vice, murderous nighttimes and knife fights invite crimes" - Nasir Jones

I've always liked creative...I probably have 3 SB Live! cards in a box collecting dust, which replaced the SB16s that were previously collecting dust. I have one CPU using an X-Fi pro gamer and the other using the onboard sound. I'm about ready to shelve the X-Fi. Why? Stupid proprietary interface. I want to plug my headset into the front of the computer, I refuse to pay $75 for creative's front interface doohickey, and I'm tired of having to crawl under the desk to plug in. Why can't they just pin out to the Intel standard? Same number of pins, they just need to rearrange them a bit. why, Why, WHY WHY!!!

You need to remember more.

Creative Labs was seriously challenged by an API called A3D, developed by a company called Aureal. Sound cards based on their Vortex chipset were far and away the best gaming audio cards on the market, and were being supported by the 3D gaming market en masse thanks to their amazing ability to duplicate full surround sound over only two speakers or headphones (Using "HRTF" - Head-Related Transfer Functions.) A3D was preferred by developers, and supported over the poorly thought out EAX 1.0, which had no similar features.

Creative couldn't beat them, and was losing market share, so instead they began a legal campaign suing Aureal for patent infringement. The legal battle dragged out a long time, and in the end, the judge threw the case out as frivolous and i believe even fined creative labs for it. But Creative Labs had deep pockets, Aureal did not. Its investors, disheartened by legal fees and uncertainty, pulled the plug on the company and creative labs cannibalisticly bought up the remains, and burried A3D tech, never to be seen again. EAX is a pale comparison to my old Turtle Beach Montego A3DXtream card.

**** you, Creative Labs.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A3D

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
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This.

However, Creative Labs' dominance was primarily because audio is a section of gaming performance that hasn't ever really been a highlight of the gaming experience, so there's little room to compete. You can run 3d benchmarks, and add new nifty whiz-bang features to allow for new graphical effects, and stick them on a demo PC in the store to show them off, and people go "wow."

But far fewer people would be able to appreciate, or even distinguish, a similar level of competition in quality on a sound card. It's just not an envelope that's being demanded to be pushed across a broad spectrum of the customer demographic.

Taly's wiki search plugin was faster than my seeing this thread, though, so she already covered what I would've said mourning A3D and my trusty Turtle Beach Montego II.

That said, aside from EAX's comparative clunkiness when stood side-by-side with A3D, Creative makes a solid product line at a reasonable price for the market it aims at. I've had driver issues a few times (most notably early in Vista's product cycle, when their Vista support was pretty spotty and unpolished), but the cards themselves are good workhorses for the average user. Their niche is probably becoming obsolete, though, as processors and RAM continue to advance, making the system hit of using onboard sound solutions like Realtek more and more trivial.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

CL dominates because they understand the break point of providing a good product at a decent price. If they were greedier, more companies would spring up to compete. As it is right now, investors look at CL's business model and go, 'even if I make as good or a better product, can I make a profit competing with the reasonably priced dominant brand in the market?

Someday maybe, but not today.

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The U. S. Constitution doesn't guarantee happiness, only the pursuit of it. You have to catch up with it yourself. B. Franklin

"A mind needs books like a sword needs a whetstone." -- Tyrion Lannister, A Game of Thrones

Those AMD K6-2's ran Quake 2 much better than the competing Intel chips. The problem was, you had to download the Q2 version that was optimized for the 3DNow! instruction set from AMD's website.

But man, pair one of those with the Diamond Monster 3D 12 MB Voodoo2 cards, and you got some seriously killer framerates back in the day! Man, I played the hell outta some Q2. I used to bring my PC up to work on the weekends, so I could play on the T1. Heh, good times.

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"I Live, I Love, I Slay, and I Am Content."
- Conan the Barbarian

I probably logged more hours into Quake/Quake2 CTF than I have in the 5 years of playing WoW. Just to give you an idea of how much I played those games.

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Les Zombis et les Loups-Garous!

Wait, so they had better simulated surround sound? Did their **** smell better too? Did anyone actually use it? Why don't we go back and start cheering Dolby Surround/Pro Logic while we're at it.

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"It's real, grew up in trife life, the times of white lines
The hype vice, murderous nighttimes and knife fights invite crimes" - Nasir Jones

HRTF 2-speaker surround sound is the only surround most people will ever experience while gaming on a computer, unless they're plugged into their television/home theater. There's no way I'll ever have rear speakers behind my computer, because they'd be out in the middle of the floor.

Furthermore, it's not "simulated" anymore than actual 5.1 surround. The human ear hears it the exact same way....HRTF set up correctly is indistinguishable from having rear speakers. Lastly, headphones are the only truly immersive sound experience you'll ever have, as they shut out your surrounding environs and prevent accoustic anomolies that plague all home theater setups, like sound bouncing off the walls and similar.

A3D's "simulation" was perfect. With a pair of headphones on, you could position something around you in a full 360 degree area of effect. (Just like regular 5.1, it still couldn't do sounds above or below you very well.) When using speakers, it was pretty good, but when using headphones actually had better positioning than actual 5.1.

As to why Creative Labs doesn't use it very well, well, they also sell speakers. :p

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

That's why L shapped desks are great, monitor at the corner, rear speakers at the ends of the L, out of the way and not something you have to move, that's what i've done for surround sound for the last 6+ years. Of course my computer speakers also came with triposds for the rear speakers so you could move them out behind you when gaming then back under the desk out of the way when not in use.

And i've yet to hear one of those supposed 2.1 speaker surround setups sound anywhere near as good as a real 5.1 or 7.1 setup, they more sounds like stereo with a weird echo effect to me and certainly don't give you that true positional suround experience of hearing something behind you and being able to tell roughly where behind you it is simply by sound.

Yes, if you choose stands. There are other options.



I never said it wasn't simulated. All sound reproduction involves compression and decoding techniques, from the old analog phonographs, up to all the different digital formats, processing and voice-coil driven driver technology that is the standard today. I said it was simulated surround, which it is. Unfortunately, you can't mimic having rear sound sources accuractely, anymore than sound reproduction can reproduce actual sound. Headphones still includes acoustic anamolies, nearly all top models are analog so they rely on the sound board for processing which doesn't have infinite bandwidth, nor is the source itself uncompressed.



There's no such thing as a "perfect simulation", so I'm not sure what you mean by that statement. And as you already stated, sound is only processed in a full azimuthal range, without regard to the zenith positioning.

CL's speaker line didn't even become developed or marketed very seriously until they got the THX stamp which is fairly recent in scheme of the last two decades. Their speaker line wasn't even really fleshed out until after Klipsch came to the PC market.

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"It's real, grew up in trife life, the times of white lines
The hype vice, murderous nighttimes and knife fights invite crimes" - Nasir Jones

This is probably correct, because only one company ever did it well, and Creative Labs killed and buried them with legal paperwork. And they did it very well. The gaming industry knew it, they were supporting A3D en masse instead of EAX right up until Aureal died. For example, The first "Thief" game made heavy use of it, to the point of some deaf-advocacy group complaining to Eidos that their game was inaccessible to the hearing impaired), as did Unreal. Both were completely different experiences with A3D than they were otherwise. I've never had a more immersive surround sound experience than with A3D over headphones--ever. 5.1 or 7.1 doesn't hold a candle to it in any respect. Additionally, A3D was also inexpensive, and you can't underestimate the importance of having it function over headphones when you don't live alone, too, since other people probably want to watch TV or listen to music. I'll never waste money on a 5.1 speaker setup for a computer, but A3D was a great buy.

Creative does a little bit of it in current incarnations of EAX (they did buy the tech), but it's a half-assed implementation that doesn't sound nearly as convincing as A3D is. (Incidentally, this is the main reason I want an X-Fi card in any new computer -- since I'm never going to use a 5.1 surround setup at my PC, even the half-assed implementation Creative is doing is better than nothing.)

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

I think it's time to stop mourning and move on, Taly.

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Les Zombis et les Loups-Garous!

Oh, the fact that i'll even touch a CL card now says a lot. It took years. :p

I just wish they'd make something as good as the tech they buried, so I could enjoy great surround sound out of my headphones.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

I still won't touch Nvidia because of 3dFX.

/mourn voodoo.

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Holy shitsnacks!

Nvidia didn't kill 3DFX. They just bought the company while they were already "going into the light."

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Les Zombis et les Loups-Garous!