Sensaura’s S-3DPA

Sensaura’s S-3DPA is not the most famous 3D sound and reverb engine but it’s the most widely used with over 30 million shipped products using it. Most of these are never used for gaming but several of the top of the line cards use it including Diamond’s now cancelled MX400, VideoLogic’s SonicFury, Turtle Beach’s Santa Cruz, Hercules GameTheater XP and Terratec’s Six Pack 5.1+. Two more recent well known licensees are nVidia for its nForce chip and Microsoft for its Xbox, both identical when it comes to the audio chip.

Sensaura uses HRTF for headphones, 2 and 4-speakers, the latter also known as multi-drive. A 5.1 version is also available but currently we only know of one Sensaura license that uses it, Analog Devices for its software solution SoundMax 3.0 (included on some motherboards) and even there it is not in the latest SoundMax 3.0 drivers that we have for testing. The reason most others don’t use it is it’s currently only available in a software version. That is doesn’t take advantages of the 3D sound acceleration most soundcard offers to lower CPU usage. GameTheater XP and Santa Cruz/SonicFury instead use their own 5.1 virtual modes (for our impressions of these read our reviews). The nForce doesn't offer any center channel and most likely the same is the case for the Xbox since it use the same audio chip.

Just like Creative Labs' Live and Audigy and QSound's Q3D, Sensaura's S-3DPA engines supports A3D 1.0 in addition to DS3D by converting the A3D 1.0 calls to DS3D. Some of the WDM drivers (required in Windows XP/2000) unfortunately seem to lack this A3D 1.0 support. This includes the nForce where nvidia for legal reason say they won't support it at all (regardless of the Operating system you use).

Sensaura's S-3DPA engine has a reverb component they named EnvironmentFX, which offers support for I3DL2, EAX 1.0 and 2.0. It currently lacks support for EAX Advanced HD, which only the Audigy supports. With no games yet released it's impossible to tell if lack of EAX Advanced HD support will become a major issue or not. More details on I3DL2 and EAX Advanced HD can be found in our API article

The 3D positioning of Sensaura is excellent regardless if you use headphones, 2 or 4-speakers. We think the 3D positioning using headphones is only slightly behind Aureal's A3D engine and clearly better than what QSound and Creative Labs offer. The 2-speaker solution is even better being on par with the Aureal's A3D engine overall. The 4-speaker solution has been through some changes in approach with some mid versions time wise (early drivers of the Santa Cruz used it) having notably poorer distinction between front and rear compared to other engines as well as earlier version of it. The most recent versions have changed this to again offer excellent front / rear positioning. It's still not as distinct as Creative or QSound for sounds that are close to directly behind the listener but the side placements are the best of all the engines, as are the elevation cues. In the latter case it's just like with 2-speakers not very noticeable in games, but the better side positioning is.

Can be worth noting that Sensaura offers something they call VirtualEAR which allows you to tweak the 3D sound for your ear. It's an optional feature that only some Sensaura based soundcards offers but you can also buy it directly from Sensaura. We haven't been very impressed with the gains offered by this tool but we have seen some people reporting a significant improvement. As mentioned above we already consider the headphone algorithms excellent without tweaking.

In addition to the basic 3D sound positioning the Sensaura engine offers support for a new feature named ZoomFX. It's an extension to DS3D that Sensaura created that takes into account the volume of the sound sources. So far only one game supports it so we don't know if this feature offer a significant benefit or not.

When it comes to reverb quality the picture is more mixed. The quality is not far behind the live but the lack of tweaking the reverb levels and consistency puts it clearly behind the Live overall. When I say the consistency is lacking I should be clear I never think it sounds awful in any game but in several cases it's barely noticeable while the Live, Audigy and in some cases also QSound cards offer a clearly noticeable reverb effects in the same game. Overall we would still describe it as a good reverb engine for EAX 2.0 games while for the most recent engine it is rather minor benefit over no support at all in a high percentage of the EAX 1.0 games.

Having said that, it's important to point out we consider 3D sound to be a more important aspect of the aural environment in most games than reverb, even when using a card with as excellent a reverb engine as the Live or Audigy.

For more details on Sensaura read our Sensaura article.