 |
|
Mark Muschett takes a sneak peek at Diamond's MX400 Drivers |
|
|
|
|
|
| Sound News | Press
Releases | Archives | Week In
Review | Editorials
| Articles | |
|
|
|
||||
|
|||||
|
|
Diamond Monster Sound MX400 Sneak Peek - Mark Muschett- Last updated January 13, 2000
Update: The card is basically unsupported with the exit of S3/Diamond (now SonicBlue) from the soundcard martket. For this reason a review of this product is currently a low priority since the conclusion would be to strongly recommend against buying it. This is especially true now with the release of WindowsXP which require WDM drivers that Diamond has and most likely never will release. We don't have an MX400 board but we do have the 2.04 MX400 drivers. Given that the MX400 is based on the same core design as Terratec DMX that we do have we decided to take a sneak peak at how the new drivers that will ship with the MX400 are looking. Note that actual performance may vary since we had to be creative to get this drivers to install on Terratec' s DMX but it should give a reasonable peek of what the MX400 will have to offer in terms of performance. We won't get into 3D audio quality and reverb quality here. However, the MX400 is using the same version of Sensaura's technology as Hoontech's XG-Digital that we recently reviewed. Some things will be different between the two cards but what we think about the 3d audio and reverb can be directly applied to the MX400. In terms of CPU usage this is what we saw. Note again these are on the DMX and not the MX400. First up some numbers from Aureal's test program, Minerva: Device Selected: Monster Direct Sound Driver Next up are some ZD audio numbers. These are on the same machine that our other ZD audio numbers are run on. For the numbers to compare to head to our main DS3D benchmarks page.
The other quick benchmark I was able to run was the Unreal Tournament Demo. For more on how we do it check our main Unreal Tournament Benchmarking Page. With the the current DMX drivers Unreal Tournament is basically unplayable for me with 3D sound enabled. The benchmarks showed an average fps of 14.67. Using the MX400 drivers the game runs well and benchmarks at 23.98 fps with 3dhardware enabled and 16 effect channels and 23.7 fps with 32 effects channels. Thats actually slightly faster than I got with the Live on the same machine but keep in mind that an extra 64 MB of RAM is now in the machine. The machine these tests were run on is machine B in those tests. Running on machine A with the same exact configuration as on the benchmark page we got 23.21 with 32 3D streams at 48 kHz and 24.11 with 32 3D streams at 22 kHz. In both cases without any music played. This is slightly slower than the Live but not anything significant. We also run the Half-Life Benchmark and with EAX enabled we got 36.0 FPS, this is actually faster than the Live with LW 2.0 or later drivers but 1 fps slower than the Live with LW 1.0 drivers. It's only Half-Life where the Live got slower after the LW 2.0 drivers. You can check out our Half-Life Benchmark page to see how the 36.0 score compares to other cards. It's easy to draw the conclusion that while the MX400 may not win any benchmark tests performance is good enough to make it a non issue on a reasonably fast CPU (Celeron 300A o/c to 450 Mhz). Its also worth noting that like the Hoontech Digital-XG, these MX400 drivers use Sensaura's new reverb engine that supports EAX 1, 2.0 and I3DL2 along with translating A3D 1.x calls to DS3D. In terms of API support, don't let the Monster name fool you. The MX400 does not use an Aureal chipset and as such does not support A3D 2.0 or the upcoming A3D 3.0. The reverb quality is improved from earlier drivers and while to our ears its still not as good as the Live or QSound's reverb, its definitely good enough to be a positive feature. Finally, a quick test seems to say that the Canyon3D can finally play multiple wave files as I was able to run WinAmp with waveout and have 2 other wav files going at the same time. That's just a quick look at some of what the MX400 drivers should offer. Hopefully we can take a look at these drivers on an actual MX400 sometime soon! For more information on Sensaura, DS3D and EAX you can check out the following resources: Have comments or questions on this feature?
|
Sound Card Reviews Hurricane Extreme Initial Review SoundBlaster Live! reference review SoundBlaster Live! Platinum 5.1 European Edition SoundBlaster Live! Platinum 5.1 America's Edition Sound Blaster Live! Player 5.1 Sound Blaster Live! X-Gamer 5.1 Hoontech SoundTrack Digital-XG Boostaroo Headphone Amplifier / Splitter Sound Blaster Live!Drive I and II Sound Blaster Creative Digital I/O 2 |
|
|
|
All content, design and work is ©
2001 - 3D Sound Surge Please respect the copyrights of the articles and writers herein. All copyrights are enforced by 3DSS.