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Mark Muschett puts Diamond's Vortex 2 based Monster Sound MX300 through its paces. |
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Diamond Monster Sound MX300 Last Updated: February 12, 2001
First Impressions:
Update: The designer and driver developer for the Vortex2, the chip this card uses, Aureal, has ceased to exist. Creative Technology announced on September 21, 2000 that they would buy substantially all of the assets of Aureal Semiconductor, Inc., including patents, trademarks and other intellectual property. Creative Labs Craig McHugh last year said in an interview done by MaximumPC made it clear that Creative only bought the intellectual property not the liability. That is they will not sell, support or develop drivers for Aureal products. Quite similar to the deal between Nvidia and 3dfx. Craig also said that Aureal has retained contractors to finish a set of drivers for Aureal based cards. However several months has now passed without seen any new driver release which makes us believe their won't be any more driver release for this chip. VideoLogic also late last year issued the following statement on their website
As VideoLogic says the current Win9x drivers works well with most games that support DS3D or A3D. However the EAX 1.0 support is limited (only works well with some games) and there is no support for EAX 2.0. It's also doubtful how it will work with DS3D games in the future when MS adds new features. The last version DirectX8 doesn't include any new features for DS3D that require driver changes but future versions may. The Windows 2000 WDM drivers are beta form and cause problem on many systems but at least on some systems they work fairly well for DS3D and A3D 1.0 games while A3D 2.0 support is more limited. The drivers also lacks EAX 1.0 support. If you use WindowsME we suggest you try the VXD drivers and not the WDM drivers. It's currently uncertain if the next version of Windows will work with the WDM drivers but we do know that WindowsME is the last release where VXD drivers will be supported. We still think this card is an interesting option thanks to being the only card that can take full advantage of the wavetracing that some A3D 2.0 games offers but we don't recommend anyone to buy a Vortex2 based card as their only soundcard at this point. End of update
I was lucky enough to attend Diamond’s launch event back in October where they had a room set up with a Sony wide aspect plasma screen TV, and some high end home theater speakers. Toni Schneider of Aureal ran the card through its paces showing off some of the more mundane features such as MIDI and MP3 capabilities before moving to an impressive demo of Zoran’s SoftDVD decoder which decodes AC3 in software and feeds it to the MX300 for four speaker playback. Finally the moment we were all waiting for, Toni fired up Half Life: Day One which had been optimized for A3D 2.0. From the moment the actual game play started I knew we were hearing a big step forward in 3D audio realism. Aside from the aural effects of Wavetracing it was apparent, even in that crowded room, that up/down virtualization had taken a big step forward! However, one cannot make judgment on any product from a test in an environment controlled by the developer so off to my own test labs I went. To preface what follows I want to indicate that this is not a quick first impression. I have been testing the MX300 since late October starting with Aureal’s beta drivers and progressing to the shipping MX300 drivers which the review is based on, so these impressions have been developed over 5 or 6 weeks of testing. Technical Overview: The MX300 is powered by Aureal’s second generation sound chip, the Vortex 2, which cruises in at an impressive 600 hardware MIPs. I specify hardware MIPs here as there has been much discussion around "are all MIPs created equal?". The bottom line is no, but we will leave further discussion on MIPs to a future article. Rather than simply regurgitate the spec sheets that everyone has the ability to read we have chosen to go into a little more depth in this review. With the summer’s focus on the Sound Blaster Live! and its audio DSP the question that first came to mind was why did Aureal abandon the flexibility of a DSP? After all the previous editions of the Monster Sound all used DSPs. So we went right to Toni Schneider of Aureal with the question. Toni’s response was that "you can't change the physical facts of silicon engineering: a "hardwired" chip like Vortex 2 is 2-3 times more efficient than a general purpose DSP that provides the same feature set. This means a hardwired chip will be 2-3 times more powerful for the same money! And if you manage to get the feature set right, you'll never miss the flexibility of a DSP" I look at that feature set in depth through this review and offer my thoughts as to whether or not they appear to have gotten it right For starters, I also took the opportunity to ask Toni about the streaming capabilities of the Vortex 2. What he told us was the Vortex 2 features 96 DMA streams. These streams are audio data streams going from host memory down to the chip. 32 of those streams can additionally also go in the other direction, i.e. from the chip back up to host memory. Once an audio stream is inside the chip it is routed along the internal "Vortex Dataflow Bus" to go between the various core audio processing engines (sample rate conversion engine, mixer engine, 3D engine, wave table engine, etc.). The Vortex 2 driver software decides how to route the streams based on user settings and the real-time audio needs of the various applications running on your PC at any given time. Since no connections are hardwired, the chip has great flexibility that translates into optimal usage of hardware resources for any given task and the ability to re-program the data flow for new tasks. An example of the latter is multi-channel Dolby Digital streaming support which was recently integrated. This architecture also makes Vortex 2 a great fit for the upcoming WDM (Windows Driver Model), which is heavily oriented towards stream routing. The basic rule is that Vortex 2 can handle any form of audio stream and multiple active streams can add up to 96 at any given time. Of the 96 streams, 4 are pretty much permanently allocated to overhead such as the DirectSound primary buffer, or line and microphone input. That leaves 92 output streams. Of those, you can have a maximum of:
*76 3D streams for DS3D and A3D 1.x will be accessible in a future driver upgrade. The different types of streams can be mixed and matched in various ways, but they always have to add up to a maximum of 96. Note that there are other types of streams (e.g. wavOut) but these are the common ones. So what about those more "mundane" specifications? Well, aside from the 3D sound streams, the features of the Monster Sound MX300 include:
That’s quite a list for US $99.00! |
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