Diamond Monster Sound MX400

Quake 3 Performance - Pentium III 550E

It should first be noted that Quake 3 is designed to support A3D 2.0. The Diamond MX400 and Creative Labs SBLive! both support A3D 1.0 through the translation of those calls to DirectSound3D. However, A3D 2.0 support is required for Quake3, which can be accomplished on any card using Aureal's freely available "A2D" drivers that essentially convert A3D 2.0 calls to DirectSound3D.

It is in this manner that they were able to run the Quake 3 Timedemo with A3D enabled. As such the 3D effects are noticeably worse than on the Aureal cards and offer little more than standard 2D sound. In general, it won't be worth performance loss to run Quake 3 with A3D enabled on anything besides a Vortex 2.

Even though the Aureal SQ2500 comes in last performance wise, it's the only card that properly supports Quake 3's A3D 2.0 audio engine. As such, it's the only one that bothers to perform all the sound function requested and thus sounds by far the best in Quake 3.

Notice that the ~20% drop in performance when A3D is enabled on the SQ2500 - this is due to the extra CPU power required to perform the Vortex2's wavetracing.