3DsoundSurge Special Feature: Aureal vs Qsound


	Earlier in 1997 representatives from Aureal and QSound went toe to toe over 3D audio. In the process, a lot of excellent information was presented from both sides. For an excellent overview of 3D audio, browse through our debate page.

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3DsoundSurge Special Feature

Aureal vs Qsound - The Great Debate

Qsound: Scott Willing

Aureal: Toni Shneider

Date Started: June 22, 1998 Date Ended: July 8, 1998

Aureal And Qsound... The Duel Continues - June 23,98 - 2:30pm est - Frank

I'd like to respond to Qsound's two postings on your (excellent!) 3DSound Surge site regarding 3D audio APIs:

"Aureal's goal with respect to APIs remains consistent: we support all important industry standards as well as our own API for advanced, next generation features.    This way our users win in all cases: if a title has native support for A3D, the user gets the best possible 3D audio. If a title supports DirtectSound3D, it'll still sound best on A3D hardware, because we have the most advanced hardware support for that API. This is the best of both worlds, because it allows our API to drive the pace of 3D audio innovation and enable developers with the latest features and we also make sure that the user gets the broadest possible title support to derive maximum benefit from their hardware. By the way, this is very similar to what 3Dfx are doing with Glide and DS3D.

Qsound seems to have a problem with our new A3D 2.0 API. Let me explain: A3D 2.0 offers new features that are not available anywhere else. These features include universal host emulation, advanced resource management and real-time environment acoustics based on the 3D geometry of a scene. We can model sound waves as they bounce off walls, leak around corners, are obstructed by objects, can be heard through a wall from the next    room, etc. That's what our wave tracing technology is about. Since no other sound APIs or 3D audio rendering systems support these advanced features, the only way to enable them today is to define our own API for our own A3D hardware. For the future, we are working with Microsoft to get these kinds of features directly supported in DirectSound3D. This usually takes a few years, but once it is in there, it is a standard solution that anyone can support.

Qsound claims that title support for DS3D is becoming universal. This is great news!    It is not what we are hearing from developers, but the more DS3D titles the better, because they will take advantage of A3D hardware. Can Qsound provide a list of titles that are committed to DS3D support? Independent of DS3D, Aureal will continue to promote our advanced A3D features to developers in order to get them to take full advantage of our hardware capabilities. There are currently close to 200 A3D optimized titles in development.

Finally, Qqsound mentions EAX. EAX is a simple reverb API. There are many ways to get reverb into a game, EAX is one of them. However, there are a few serious problems with EAX: it currently only runs on one hardware platform that isn't shipping, it therefore has zero installed base. It also requires that a developer support FOUR separate APIs to get EAX to work: DS3D support for baseline 3D, EAX for reverb, a proprietary resource management API to handle hardware acceleration smoothly. Since the previous 3 APIs have unacceptable or no host emulation at all, the developer then needs to use a fourth, stereo fallback API and separate sound engine for non-accelerated platforms. Finally, EAX has no geometry based acoustics features (for example no sound obstruction or reflections, no sounds behind walls, etc.).    In comparison, A3D offers all of the above functionality (and then some!) under a single API. It also offers an installed base of over a million units that is growing in leaps and bounds (over 10,000 units a day) thanks to 15 sound card makers and the two biggest PC makers on the planet shipping A3D (Dell and Compaq). For those reasons, we believe that the majority of developers will continue to use A3D: is provides superior    quality with less development effort, while generating greater appeal to a larger market. However, in keeping with our API strategy of providing the most options to our users, we will continue to monitor EAX. If EAX overcomes its problems and becomes a popular API, we will look into supporting it for baseline reverb. This should be do-able because EAX is a subset of A3D 2.0.      - Toni