Trident's 4DWave-NX and Aztech's 368DSP Early Impressions

Published: July 26, 1999 -  Mikael Hagén

Update: The full review is now available of both the 4DWaveNX and Aztech's 368DSP

Both these soundcards supports headphones, 2 and 4 speakers using QSound's Q3D sound engine for 3D sound and reverb. They support DS3D, EAX and also most A3D 1.X games by converting the A3D calls to DS3D calls. In addition to 3D sound they also support QSound's stereo expansion technology, QXpander. The 368DSP also supports QMSS which is a stereo expansion technology for 4 speakers.

The reverb engine works with EAX games and you can also choose an EAX preset for games that use 3D sound but unlike the Live it doesn't work with games that just use DS like Quake2 or when you play CD audio or MP3 files.

When it comes to the quality of 3D sound I would place the card slightly behind the Live (with LW2.0 drivers) for headphones and slightly ahead of the Live but slightly behind the Vortex2 and Sensaura when it comes to 2 speaker 3D sound. 4 Speakers is also slightly behind the Live. The reverb that the 4DWave-NX uses is quite good but a bit behind the Live. The 368DSP uses an earlier reverb engine from QSound that's not that great but I guess future drivers will include the new Q3D reverb engine.

The midi quality is ok on the 4DWave-NX but rather poor for the 368DSP. Fortunately Aztech bundled Yamaha XG SoftSynthesizer S-YXG50, which offers excellent midi quality.

Driver quality seems to be good since I have had no problem with the 4DWave-NX while the 368DSP I've so far not managed to get QXpander or QMSS to work with my DVD drive and performance for DS games is rather poor. The latter I found quite surprising since even an old SB32 ISA card performs basically the same in a Quake2 benchmark as the Live but the 368DSP lags behind with about 7%. When it comes to 3D sound the performance is better so in Half-Life the 368DSP actually performs better when you select EAX then when you don't.

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