Thief: The Dark Project — Aureal Vortex vs. Sound Blaster Live — 3D Audio (HRTF) shoot-out — A3D/EAX
0REAL HARDWARE CAPTURE IN 4:3 ASPECT RATIO.
Here is a comparison between how the Turtle Beach Montego (Aureal Vortex) and the Creative Labs Sound Blaster Live (the original CT4620 model) both handle positional audio with head-related transfer functions (HRTF) in Thief: The Dark Project (1998, Looking Glass Studios). In each test, CMSS (Creative Multi-Speaker Surround) — not to be confused with CMSS 3D on the X-Fi — is also compared against standard audio output on the Live. CMSS is able to stereo enhance the audio output in the Live to offer a more precise 3D audio image. 3D audio is a method of recreating how the ears pick up sounds in the real world. It works within a stereo image, meaning that only two speakers or headphones are required for the effect to work.
Unlike what some people claim online, the Sound Blaster Live is in fact capable of 3D audio positioning; it filters the audio based on whether a sound is coming from the front, back, left, right, above or below the virtual ears (usually the camera perspective in most games, but not always). It's not identical to A3D 1.0 (which is the version that Thief 1 and 2 support) in that regard, but it's obviously possible to tell that a sound is being elevation filtered. The Live is a bit weaker with sounds emitting from above the listener, but is somewhat improved when CMSS is enabled.
With EAX enabled the Live has high-quality reverb at its disposal, which is something that even the Vortex 2 was missing in its first year of drivers. It was only in the early 2000s that A3D 3.0 and A3DVerb was made available for the Vortex 2 in response to EAX as there was only Wavetracing-based “reverb” support on Vortex 2 prior to this, which is NOT the same as the reverb heard on the Live. The A3D 2.0 Technology Brief paper from 1998 makes it clear that the “reverb” is simply late field reflections, in contrast with the early reflections done using, well, reflections (the hardware feature). In other words, they act more as directional echoes rather than reverb, which isn’t nearly as lush and complex as the kind of reverb you hear in caves or concert halls. EAX does at least accomplish that, even if it’s “only” done via signal processing and not through real-time modelling.
Drivers used for Voodoo 2: the ones that can be found on the original Thief: The Dark Project CD-ROM. Drivers used for Turtle Beach Montego: the reference 1185 drivers for Aureal Vortex AU8820. Drivers used for the Sound Blaster Live are the original August 1998 drivers (Liveware 1.0) from the driver CD-ROM.
This footage and audio was captured from the following computer:
- Dell Dimension XPS R400 case and motherboard (manufactured on April 30th 1998)
- Intel 440BX motherboard (chipset manufactured week 7 1998)
- Intel Pentium II 400 Mhz processor (S-Spec SL2S7, manufactured week 14 1998)
- Matrox Millennium II AGP (8MB) video card
- Creative Labs 3D Blaster Voodoo 2 (CT6670) (12MB) 3D accelerator card
- Creative Labs Sound Blaster Live! (CT4620) sound card
- Turtle Beach Montego (Aureal Vortex) (A3D) sound card
- 192MBs of PC100 SDR SDRAM
- Windows 98 (FE) operating system
The capturing was done in VirtualDub2 using a Datapath VisionRGB-E1S PCI-Express capture card plugged into an ASUS Maximus IV Extreme motherboard with an Intel Core i7-2600K using 8 GBs of DDR3 SDRAM and an nVidia GTX 580 video card installed. A VGA cable is connected between the vintage computer and the Datapath capture card to enable video capturing. Audio capture was done by feeding a 3.5mm stereo jack cable into the line in on the ASUS Maximus IV Extreme motherboard from the sound card of the vintage computer. Resizing/upscaling of the raw original 640x480 capture to 2560x1920 was done using VirtualDub2.
Timestamp list:
0:00 - Test 1 — A3D
0:51 - Test 1 — SB Live
1:41 - Test 1 — SB Live (CMSS)
2:33 - Test 2 — A3D
3:52 - Test 2 — SB Live
5:14 - Test 2 — SB Live (CMSS)
6:31 - Test 3 — A3D
6:59 - Test 3 — SB Live
7:27 - Test 3 — SB Live (CMSS)
7:55 - Test 4 — A3D
8:57 - Test 4 — SB Live
10:00 - Test 4 — SB Live (CMSS)
11:03 - Test 5 — A3D
11:46 - Test 5 — SB Live
12:30 - Test 5 — SB Live (CMSS)
#thiefthedarkproject #windows98 #stealthgame #lookingglassstudios #windows95 #a3d #aureal #hrtf #vga #soundblasterlive #eax #comparison
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