What is the difference between Aureal A3D emulation and certified hardware support ?

A3D is a complete driver set, with an API, geometry engine, driver stack, and 3D hardware engine to render it all.  Every A3D game that gets developed is tested to work in all A3D configurations.  Additionally, the latest games and all upcoming A3D 2.0 games use some advanced features of the A3D drivers, such as geometry support and advanced resource management. 

Emulation drivers typically capture the A3D API calls, and then route them to a driver stack and hardware or software 3D engine.  Such drivers can be made to work with some of the first generation A3D titles, such as Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II. However, they will fail with newer games such as Descent Freespace: The Great War. Even more importantly, emulation drivers will fail on all A3D 2.0 titles because of the way that 2.0 features (such as geometry based reflections and occlusions) are accessed: The game actually ships with a DLL that includes the API and soft engine portion of A3D 2.0.  That DLL makes calls directly into a low-level A3D driver interface that ships with the sound card.  The low-level driver interface only exists on genuine A3D hardware, therefore emulation drivers won't work.

By Toni Schneider from Aureal Inc

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