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Question: What is the status of the EAX/2 support for Vortex 2 based sound cards ? Answer: We plan to release EAX/reverb drivers for Vortex-2 in the first week of November. Vortex Advantage drivers to follow. More details will become available on A3D.com in the near future. Oh, I should add that the reverb drivers Aureal releases next month will support I3DL2. Question: Have a question about driver support for different OS's Such as Linux, BeOS, etc. How closely involved is Aureal in making drivers for those OS's ? Answer: Aureal has provided our chip specs to 4Front, Be Inc. and QNX. They will have drivers available very soon. Aureal also is wrting their own drivers for Linux and these will be available for free on A3D.com hopefully before the end of the year...or maybe a bit after that. :) They will be free and very functional. Question: The best/coolest technology doesn't always get market dominance. What has Aureal been able to do to get A3D out there, and are you happy with your position ? What would you like to see improved technology wise or marketing wise ? Answer: Well, Aureal was first with PCI and real-time 3D audio. Wwe got a short headstart on the bigger guys that had stagnated and gathered some really talented people together to make it work well for gamers. The game market wanted this functionality and they accepted us as a standard we happy with our position, but not content there's a lot more to come. Question: Will those upcoming drivers for alternate OS's include A3D 2.x, 3.x and/or EAX? Answer: Support for A3D on alternative OSes depends on the content demand for it. Right now there are no developers strongly demanding it yet, but with the release of Vortex drivers we expect that demand to amterialize. We haven't really done much work on A3D for other OSes yet. For EAX, that's up to Creative really. Question I plan on purchasing an SQ2500 but am wondering about the longevity of the A3D API. Since EAX is now licensed to Microsoft, does Aureal have any plans to improve the ease of use of the A3D API to developers? What is Aureal's plan for future A3D enhancements? Answer: Microsoft have only licensed the reverb algorithms from
Creative, so it's incorrect to really call this EAX. The API choice for
reverb under future versions of DirectX has not been made. It's most
likely that Microsoft will go with the IASIG's open I3DL2 standard. Question Will the new T&L accelerations of new cards coming out like GeForce and Savage2k affect how Auireal A3D2 wavetracing works? Answer: These new cards will render graphics polygons down in the hardware. With the tools mentioned above, we plan to not have to rely on graphics polygon databases to render for audio. The audio will have a separate database. This is something devs. are ok with since they need low res data for other things like r/t lighting, and collision detection. We're also talking to all the major graphics manufacturers on ways of combining h/w forces in the future! (Long term future that is!) Question: On that same note will current A3D 1.x and 2.x titles work with hardware T&L Cards? Or will they need to be patched? Answer: For existing titles, there should be no requirements to patch. For future titles, we are already working with developers and graphics manufacturers to tie in A3D rendering with the new graphics pipelines. There may be technical details in specific cases that we need to address though Question What is the projected release date of Aureal's speakers ? Answer: Our speakers are expected to ship in Q1 2000, possibly sooner but doubtful. We will be showing the speakers at COMDEX, come check 'em out! Question: When is aurl is going to nasdaq ? Answer: For NASDAQ: we're working on it. After (if) we become profitable we need to meet certain financial criteria, we'll see. Question: Sony has recently been in talks with implementing A3D in software on thier new game console being introduced next year. Is the current sound hardware on the PSX2 capable of hardware A3D support, and is Aureal in talks at all about the PSX3 having an actual Aureal chip for sound? Answer: Sony announced that Aureal was selected to provide the A3D 3.0 API and engine on PSX2. We can't talk much about this yet, but we can have A3D 3.0 scale down to work on the PSX2's hardware. We'd love to be on the PSX3 and yes, we're talking to them about it. Question Please tell us more about the upcoming A3D 3.0 API ? Answer: Current features for 3.0 include: MP3 playback (inc. 3D positional MP3 files), Volumetric Sound Sources (for things like crowds, wind), which can be occluded/reflected too, Downloadable HRTF-support, so you can pick from a selection of heads for the 3D effect, reverb support, including EAX, I3DL2, and geometric reverb based on polygons, not presets and Dolby Digital playback support. Dolby & Aureal are getting together to make A3D the way to get Dolby Digital multi-channel audio for games on the PC. Question: Will that be hardware mp3 decoding? Answer: On MP3 support, the capability will be supported in s/w by default, and in h/w when we detect a part that supports h/w MP3 decoding. Question: Will A3D 3.0 require a new chipset, or will it be able to be implemented on the current Vortex 2.x boards? Answer: A3D 3.0 is backwards compatible, so features will run on current h/w, with s/w emulation if h/w is not present. Of course, we are designing these features with h/w acceleration in mind on future cards. BTW, the same thing goes for AC3 as for MP3. (s/w emulation, if there's no h/w support.) Question: Creative Labs says that there are only 4-5 games that supports only A3D 2.0 but Quake III is one of those! Do you think that this could suffice? What is you reply to Creative Labs ? Answer: There are more than that, and many more officially announced: check out A3D.com and click on Get A3D / Games / Complete Games List. Quake III will be an A3D 2.0 title (or better) and I will be adding a bunch of hot A3D 2.0 titles to the list too...wait until you guys hear Soldier of Fortune, and Nascar Racing 3, and Prince of Persia 3D, and Unreal Tournament and Deus Ex, and Messiah, etc. etc. etc. That's how I would respond: "Listen to Unreal Tournament, or Soldier of Fortune, or Quake III with A3D 2.0 support, and tell if you don't think wavetracing is the best. :)" Question: Is there going to be any support for hooking more devices, like with the sblive ? More musical interfaces ? Answer: Now that Aureal has gone to the retail market directly, we can consider a much wider group of options. Support for multiple Vortex chips is something that has come up, but there are no definete plans as of yet. We will also be working on future options to take advantage of our speakers once they are released. We can also now create our own upgrade cards to support any types of devices. Customer demand will be the driving force to determine which upgrades we do support. Question: Does Aureal do any in house testing of companies A3D products? Exactly what process does Aureal take to make sure the quality of each A3D title is up to code? Answer: We do a lot of in house testing on A3D titles. Some developers get us involved earlier than others, but we like to test titles from a fairly early delevopement stage. We have an SQA group dedicated to testing our products, as well as one employee, whose main focus is testing A3D titles. Question: What's up with BeOS compatible drivers for Vortex1 and 2? Answer: BeOS drivers are in testing right now, shouldn't be too long now. You'll have to email Be for a real estimate. Will Aureal continue to sell to OEMs and board manufactuers, now that the direct market sell had been introduced? Answer: Regarding PC OEMs, Systems Integrators and motherboard people: YES!! We're about to announce a ton of new customers, and will continue to support our current customers. Question: With the release of Win2000, what new improvements will be layed out into the market and will that lead A3D to a leadship status in the 3D sound market? Will we have access to feature complete drivers in Windows 2000? Answer: We are working very hard to get our WDM drivers done. Aureal is working on a WAVE PCI driver. Since we are using Wave PCI(sometimes referred to as Scatter Gather) we will be able to provide full hardware 3d sound acceleration. Our WDM drivers are already included in the betas builds of Win2000. The first build that had the drivers enabled was RC2. Unless something drastic happens, we expect to be in all subsequent builds of the OS. Quesiton: From an Engineering Standpoint, what advantages does Aureal's tech have vs. Sensaura's Tech? Answer: Sensaura use HRTFs just as we do. However, theirs are simulated, not measured like ours. We now have downloadable HRTFs which mean you have a selection of custom HRTFs to choose from. On the other features front, we have all the wavetracing features, and others mentioned under A3D 3.0, Sensaura don't. They do have a couple of extensions for DS3D coming out. One I believe is something similar to our volumetric sound sources (though they don't reflect or occlude). The other is an alternative "near field model" which is just the model they use when a sound is near your head. We actually switched our models back when A3D 2.0 first came out, based on developer requests. Question: Will there be a TOSLink in future products? Are new drivers for Vortex 1 based cards still being developed with EAX and what not support? Answer: The data that we got from most of our costomers is that they would rather have the Coax SPDIF connector rather than the TOSLINK connector. If the demend changes, we can change the boards to accomidate whichever is more popular. The same goes for enhancements for the Vortex 1. Popular demand dictates what we support. Question: Will full featured drivers with SMP support for Aureal cards under NT systems ever see the light of day? Answer: Our WDM 2000 will support SMP. We are currently looking into supporting SMP under NT. The WDM drivers in the box are fairly basic. Microsoft requests that we get the bare bones driver very stable. If there is time for us to add features to the driver on the windows 2000 CD, we would love to. However based on Microsofts schedule, we may be forced to include only a basic driver on the CD, and then post a more robust driver on our web page shortly after the OS has shipped retail. Question: Will Aureal support 3D-Now! or any other SIMD set in their future drivers? Answer: Work on optimization for these extensions will be featured in upcoming drivers. We are reviewing all the hotspots in all aspects of our drivers. Where it makes sense to take advantage of...the 3D-Now! and SIMD extensions. Question: What about speed of Aureal A3D 3.0? Will it eat alot of cpu time compared with Aureal A3D 2.0.x ? Answer: It depends on the functionality and the card! ;-) Obviously, adding s/w reverb support does add CPU overhead, although we have optimized this down pretty amazingly already. For a very good quality reverb (comparable to h/w EAX in our opinion), it's about 7% of a p2-233. Other features will add cost in s/w, but upcoming h/w will accelerate the features. Question: Are there any plans for more possible streams of audio in the near future ? Answer: We can do 76 concurrent 3D streams right now. Developers are
happy with this number. We can fall back to software and allow an
unlimited number of streams. However, anything more than that gets
disorienting. Question: But the Aureal A3D 2.0 API has some bugs/conceptes like DirectSound3D. When I am allocating sound, hardware channels allocated locks too. Answer: If you use the Resource Manager, you don't need to worry about buffer allocation. A3D takes care of it you.
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