I don't know much of Gravis' history, I think the company just couldn't compete, besides sound cards Gravis also manufactured gaming peripherals. Aureal was bought by Creative.
What happened to Gravis and Aureal? I almost never hear of these companies, except when I am trying to configure a DOS game.....
Well, Gravis were at their peak during the DOS days - Back then, 'tho, we didn't have things like DirectX, so if you wanted to play a DOS game with sound that didn't come from the 'PC Bleeper', it pretty much HAD to have SoundBlaster compatibility.
The Gravis Ultrasounds didn't, and used a really ****ty emulation module which worked with almost nothing. Bit like the emulation Creative bundle with their older PCI sound cards now
However, because the GUS was so awesome (It had multi-channel hardware mixing; The first consumer card I know of that had it!) they actually managed to get a fair bit of support. The Demoscene espescially loved the GUS; Almost all of the later 1990+ DOS demos had GUS support in some form.
But support was really what killed them, esp. when Creative released the AWE-32 (Also a very good card).
If Gravis had managed to survive to the Win95/DirectX era they would have been okay because driver support wouldn't have mattered, but they screwed themselves over and died before it came to pass
I had both the AWE and the GUS, but unfortunately they were both PnP which meant they were complete BASTARDS to get working together unless you hacked your own BIOS' PnP tables or could figure out how to force each card to assign itself a certain IRQ!
The Aureal Vortex2 was a legendary sound card chipset back in the day - It implemented HRTF (basically 3D sound simulation) years before Creative did, and the A3D2.0 API it used destroys EAX.
EAX is basically a set of parameters a game sends to the card to set Reverb. etc. at different levels - Very simplistic.
A3D2 took the actual 3D gemoetry and calculated reverb, reflections etc. from the scene!
I bought the SB Live! Platinum 5.1 I have now about the same time my friend got his Diamond Multimedia MX300 (It was quite weird actually because he also had a Video card (A 12MB Voodoo2) from Creative - At the time, this was a bit surreal because Creative had ALWAYS been the de facto sound card company and Diamond had always been the de facto video card company!!
).
We'd both gotten Half-Life 1 recently, and I gotta say, the difference was staggering.
With EAX, it isn't that much different from the software reverb HL uses if you turn off EAX - Going from a echoy pipe to an out door area will instantly change the reverb at the transition point; Pretty unnatural.
With the A3D2 it transitions the way you'd imagine it would for real.
It's hard to describe... The sound 'sounded' good in EAX, but 'felt' awesome on the A3D.
The only downside with the Vortex2 was DOS support - Basically it didn't have any worth talking about.
I never understood why they died; I blame it on Creative's inertia (They are like the Microsoft of the Soundcard world; They make half-assed buggy pieces of crap, but everybody still uses them so they are a semi-standard.)
Oddly, despite buying them out, Creative don't appear to have used much of the tech they would have gotten from A3D. I suspect it's because they were/are too thick to understand the code
I'm just bitter Gravis and Aureal went out of business, because as others have said, there are NO alternatives now
There's still a loose hope that nVidia might try to enter Creative's turf with a successor of SoundStorm. I wish they'd do that, soon.
I hope so! The SoundStorm was a pretty good chipset - IMHO not as good in hardware as the latest Creative silicon at the time, but nVidia can a) Write drivers properly and b) QA Test their products properly, both things which Creative have never been able to do.
