Maybe Creative may have shot itself in the foot with the move of buying Sensaura. If nVidia wants to come and fill the void. Hercules and others will still produce soundcards and an offerring from nVidia might be seen as a viable alternative. Add-on PCI cards may still be in the cards for nVidia and while more expensive than using Sensaura having an onboard DSP and real-time Digital encoding would make them very attractive. If nVida wants they may soon have many board makers open to their sound solutions with proper driver support. And if so the wheel will come full rotation with Aureal once again selling chips to sound card manufacturers. Sort of. Something they never should have stopped doing anyway.
Creative "creates" new possible Competitor
- Thread starter InternetOwl
- Start date
As long as Nvidia soundstorm chips are mated to POS codecs and op-amps it's still gonna suck.
They seriously need to get it mated up with some nice DAC's and a nice op-amp.
They seriously need to get it mated up with some nice DAC's and a nice op-amp.
"Nostalgia is a file that removes the rough edges from the good old days" -Doug Larson
Aureal failed because developers found A3D too complicated to program for to be worthwhile. It's not like they were bought out because they were successful. It's more akin to NVIDIA salvaging the remains of 3dfx. Padding the ol' patent portfolio is cheap insurance. Creative did aquire companies like E-MU Systems and Ensoniq and thus brought higher-end or otherwise better gear to the masses on the cheap. Whither Reveal and Roland and Gravis?!
So you reckon Aureal had a viable product?
Anyhoo, let's not pretend that any company is a philanthropic endeavor nor assume that being aquired is not desirable or planned.
Dr Rudolph Burger, chief executive officer of Scipher said: "The sale of Sensaura demonstrates Scipher's ability to create value from commercialising IP, either through licensing or the development of IP-protected businesses which are then spun out or sold."
Anyhoo, let's not pretend that any company is a philanthropic endeavor nor assume that being aquired is not desirable or planned.
Dr Rudolph Burger, chief executive officer of Scipher said: "The sale of Sensaura demonstrates Scipher's ability to create value from commercialising IP, either through licensing or the development of IP-protected businesses which are then spun out or sold."
Hell yeah! The Aureal cards were great. Back in the day, I had, I had an MX300 (Aureal Vortex 2) and a SB Live card. The Live card was an utter joke compared to the MX300. It went back and I kept the MX300. The Vortex 2 cards were selling very well. Vortex 3 was gonna rock. Creative sued Areal just to put them under.
Yeah, they were great cards. I had the MX300 as well. This is why im never going to purchase a creative product again too. They bought the company and never took advantage of what they had and totally got rid of support of any kind for the products that were in place. :|
IMHO if the technology was "all that" then the company woulda been kickin a$$ and creative wouldn't have been able to purchase them.
Thorin
It was all that. A3D HRTF positional audio was years ahead of EAX, which was just static "reverb" effects. The cards were selling very well. Creative launched a frivolous lawsuit that they knew they couldn't win and put Aureal under with legal costs. A big company with deep pockets eliminating competition. Not like it hasn't been done before.
Ya Aureal didn't have huge CPU overheads or anything
But that's just how I saw it........
Thorin
Just because they didn't have enough money to stay alive, doesn't mean it wasn't a superior technology.
It definately was. The sound from an A3D game was so far ahead of any EAX. CPU overhead? Did it ever make the games unplayable? No, so it doesn't really matter.
I for one, am really pist at Creative for killing the technology.
It definately was. The sound from an A3D game was so far ahead of any EAX. CPU overhead? Did it ever make the games unplayable? No, so it doesn't really matter.
I for one, am really pist at Creative for killing the technology.
Thorin, obviously you were not a fan of Aureal, or dont know much about them. They were a good company with great products. A3D was very widely adopted. At least as much as EAX was. Every decent game that was out at the time had A3D support. Anyone who ever had a card especially those who also had a SB Live card knew how much better they were. As far as CPU usage goes, it was not that high. Drivers improved upon the early results. Its easy to have low CPU usage when you dont do anything special (EAX) compared to complex calculations (A3D).
Not to mention all the big oem's carried them. Dell, Micron, etc.
The two biggest game engines in the industry, Quake3 and Unreal used A3D.
Oh, and Half-life.
The two biggest game engines in the industry, Quake3 and Unreal used A3D.
Oh, and Half-life.
That's partly correct. I never owned a card but that was simply because of what I read at the time. Which was that alot of people liked them and enjoyed the technology but that it's benefits vs it's higher overhead didn't make it worth owning.
Agreed. For it's (reletively) short life A3D was widely adopted.
I agree that yes alot of people found the sound quality better, but at the same time the majority of those people complained about the higher overhead.
I think I've covered the CPU usage.
Hmmm that's interesting. nVidia manages to do alot more with their output than Creative does and their CPU usage is even lower.
Maybe I'm being unfair (I can admit that) but I see it like this. 3dfx died because they couldn't continue to compete with the big boys (like Aureal and Creative). AMD has managed to continue to compete. It's all about convincing your users (investors/consumers) that you have the superior technology and demonstrating so time and time again. If you do that then you end up with the deep cofers (sp?) that allow you to buy and/or litigate out of existance other assimilatable (good word eh?) or competing technologies.
Thorin
Two things you didn't mention.
1. Id IMMEDIATELY dropped A3D 2.0 support from Quake3 in the early patch upgrades. It was to buggy for them to work with. The game NEVER supported the more generic A3D 1.0.
2. Unreal uses A3D 1.0 (as well as EAX 1.0 and Directsound), which is really nothing special and is backward supported by virtually every sound card out there.
Also, Aureal was NOT sued to backrupcy despite what all the Anti-Creative zealots will tell you. I was working for a GE financial company at the time and we tracked things like this. Although the lawsuit didn't help, the company tanked because it just didn't sell enough sound cards - period.
They also made some mistakes similiar to what 3dfx made when they invested all that cash into capital to manufacturer their own cards when they should have been wooing more vendors. Their sales were never good enough to recoup thier investment and the bills just piled on.
Regarding Creative's purchase of Sensaura, whether you like it or not, it's a great business move on Creative's part. 6.4 mil is relatively cheap. What did you expect? For them NOT to buy it? That's just plain stupid. Also, the company would not have been for sale or take-over if it weren't in trouble. Like any other business, Creative is in it to make money, NOT to make you happy.
Personally, I think Sensaura had it coming. They blew their chance when they failed to market their MacroFX API to game/application developers.
I knew someone would understand where I was coming from, and have read the same things as me 
Tks Brian48
Thorin
Tks Brian48Thorin
Well, I DID OWN both the Aureal Vortex 2 and the SBLive and I can say there was no contest. If you actually owned one, you would see what I mean. CPU usage was no big deal. All the games I played ran just fine. The A3D positional sound was amazing in games compared to the cheesy echo I got with Creatives EAX. Q3 was the only game that had sucky A3D support. ID didn't seem to have a handle on 3D sound.
And comparing 1998 Aureal tech to 2003 nVidia? Yeah, OK.
BTW, any idea where nVidia's sound developers came from? Thats right. Aureal.
Well, I don't think there's any real argument in regards to which technology was superior. As mentioned before, having superior technology is irrelevant. Aureal failed because they just didn't make enough money. You can blame the competition all you want, but that's just the way it is in business.
Regarding the CPU overhead issue, the hit may not have been significant to you if you had a fairly decent system, but when the first wave of A3D 2.0 cards came out, the P200/233MMX was still considered mid-range and for these systems, the performance impact was VERY noticable. It wasn't until a full year (or more) later when the CPU overhead concerns started dying out. By then, the SBLive was already entrenched (Creative sold over 2 million units in the first year alone).
Just FYI, I had both an MX300 and the original SBLive (4.1 analog) back in the day.
Back then I was running a PII 333 @ 412 which was fairly high end. Sound card CPU overhead has not improved all that much IMHO. Take your average game and run it with no sound, normal sound and 3D sound with one of todays sound cards. You still use up a lot of CPU cycles. Its just not as noticeable since you have so much more power available.
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