AMD - TrueAudio. Anyone using it?

[Sohaltang]

So like many of you I watched the live 290X release months ago. For several hours ALL they talked about was this TrueAudio feature. It was a huge deal but yet I have yet to really hear anyone else talking about it. Is it really a worthwhile feature? Anyone using it? How do you like it?

FWIW I know this is an audio question but its on a GPU so I believe this is the correct forum.

 

[Dman8777]

IIRC, True Audio requires game developers to code for it in their products. Because it's only available on the newest AMD hardware, which mostly isn't being used for gaming, I doubt there is much enthusiasm for it in the game industry.

 

[Hitman928]

I think the new Thief game is the first to incorporate True Audio but it won't be included until a patch which is suppose to come out later this month.

 

[Erenhardt]

KillZone Shadowfall uses sony's equivalent of TrueAudio. There was a review about the tech behind new killzone, but I can't find it.

 

[Keysplayr]

Nobody is using it. Not yet anyway.

 

[el etro]

Thief already enabled it??

 

[mindbomb]

for hardware acceleration in games, the game needs to support it. However, AMD could release a program similiar to Razer Surround which allows you to have headphone surround sound for all applications that support surround sound, or various other digital effects that you would typically find on a sound card. They can also make their own version of shadowplay, cause amd cards have an h264 encoder as well. Not really sure why these programs don't exist yet.

 

[ShintaiDK]

Thief already enabled it??

Nope.

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/gaming/2014/02/25/thief-amd-support/1

 

[Abwx]

for hardware acceleration in games, the game needs to support it. However, AMD could release a program similiar to Razer Surround which allows you to have headphone surround sound for all applications that support surround sound, or various other digital effects that you would typically find on a sound card. They can also make their own version of shadowplay, cause amd cards have an h264 encoder as well. Not really sure why these programs don't exist yet.

They could do a lot of things with all thoses DSPs , particularly
for non gaming usages, after all there are tons of peoples who
would be glad to use all this goodness for audio related purposes
of all kind , all that is needed is a GUI to have control of the DSPs
parameters...

 

[chimaxi83]

Nope. TBH, I've lost interest.

 

[f1sherman]

A3D or die

 

[Deceneu]

A3D or die

Creative has the rights for that.
I want EAX 6.
I wonder if this AMD tech can do/emulate EAX 5 though ,if Creative would allow it.

 

[BrightCandle]

What I really want to see them do is high quality true HRTF's based not on 5.1 surround sound but instead on a lot more speakers and speakers at difference distances. Its not sufficient to have near and far field and the basic system they use today. TrueAudio is going to help but its not going to fix the problem with surround sound in todays games completely.

I actually wish AMD had spun it off as a sound card really. I appreciate it might be difficult as it potentially needs the full 3D model of the world but I do feel like this is the sort of capability that ought to be on a separate sound card rather than being embedded in a GPU.

 

[tweakboy]

Well EAX no more!

 

[imaheadcase]

Trueaudio market speak for "developers please love us and don't use own software even though its just as good".

 

[Erenhardt]

I actually wish AMD had spun it off as a sound card really. I appreciate it might be difficult as it potentially needs the full 3D model of the world but I do feel like this is the sort of capability that ought to be on a separate sound card rather than being embedded in a GPU.

There was an article explaining trueaudio. One of the important things about it was the ablility to use game world enviroment to process the sound, which is only possible thanks to integrating it into gpu. It said its windows limitation, or rather current sound api.
I thought it was in anand article, but apparently not.

 

[Gloomy]

The audio in Thief is so bad it would take a miracle to fix it. I actually think it's going to make TrueAudio look bad. Everything is the wrong volume, voices don't seem attached to where they come from, you're assailed by loud noises from every direction, constant looping of the same sounds/voices, lip-sync issues, it's all effed. So bad.

If it's one thing that AMD knows how to do, it is make their stuff look extremely bad. They picked the worst game to showcase TrueAudio. Cause having better sound, won't fix the sound issues in this game.

Though to be honest, I haven't heard people complaining about the sound in the first place so it doesn't seem like anyone cares. This sets a bad precedent for TrueAudio; people don't care about bad sound.

 

[3DVagabond]

All of the complaints you have voiced is something TrueAudio could address. Whether or not they will address them remains to be seen, of course.

 

[Deders]

There was an article explaining trueaudio. One of the important things about it was the ablility to use game world enviroment to process the sound, which is only possible thanks to integrating it into gpu. It said its windows limitation, or rather current sound api.
I thought it was in anand article, but apparently not.

EAX would do this, you'd get different reverbs reacting to the kind of environment they were in. It's easily programmed in to the game engine.
Last game I remember to use it effectively was Unreal 3, you could hear the muffled sounds of people fighting in a different environment (stone cavern for instance) in the next room whilst you would still have the clear sounds from the room you were in.

Unfortunately Microsoft decided to omit hardware acceleration from Vista and 7's sound API. Having Hardware acceleration back on Audio might be the one reason I end up upgrading to Windows 8, but as I already have a fairly powerful audio engine that is has been practically dormant for years, I would welcome some kind of OpenAL workaround to make use of what I already have. Or if it comes to it, a separate AMD Trueaudio card, not locked in to the Graphics chip.

I wonder how possible it would be to get the best of both worlds, All the new stuff from an AMD card with a Nvidia card for PhysX?

 

[3DVagabond]

EAX is nothing like TrueAudio. TrueAudio doesn't use preset reverbs. It actually calculates the 3D environment

TrueAudio is part of the GPU It's not something that either can be incorporated without the GPU nor is it intended to replace your sound card. It's not, for example, going to make your current interface to your speakers or headphones any better or worse. If you want to drive your sound source, be it headphones or speakers, with a high quality analogue signal you will still need a high quality sound card. It won't improve your SNR, lower distortion (THD/IMD), drive high Imp headphones better, etc. than whatever your output allows. If you continue to use on board sound, you will get on board quality. TrueAudio gives you realistic cues to locate the position of the sound source in the game world the same way your ears would perceive it in the real world.

 

[Deders]

EAX is nothing like TrueAudio. TrueAudio doesn't use preset reverbs. It actually calculates the 3D environment

TrueAudio is part of the GPU It's not something that either can be incorporated without the GPU nor is it intended to replace your sound card. It's not, for example, going to make your current interface to your speakers or headphones any better or worse. If you want to drive your sound source, be it headphones or speakers, with a high quality analogue signal you will still need a high quality sound card. It won't improve your SNR, lower distortion (THD/IMD), drive high Imp headphones better, etc. than whatever your output allows. If you continue to use on board sound, you will get on board quality. TrueAudio gives you realistic cues to locate the position of the sound source in the game world the same way your ears would perceive it in the real world.

So it's more akin to Ray Tracing, like A3D was?

I still fondly remember the days when choosing a soundcard was down to more than SNR/Distortion levels.

I'm sure it would still be easy enough to make a non GPU bound solution, the properties of each surface would still have to be tagged at the point of level design so although it might add a little more overhead you could still apply this to the geometry and send it over the PCIe bus to an add-in card that supports TrueAudio for it to calculate. Maybe with a little additional overhead but most likely worth it.

 

[motsm]

All of the complaints you have voiced is something TrueAudio could address. Whether or not they will address them remains to be seen, of course.

TrueAudio can't address those issues in it's current state. It plugs into existing game audio engines like FMOD and Wwise, it doesn't replace them, so they still use their own positional audio and effects. What TrueAudio will do is run them with hardware acceleration and translate the games 3D sound output into an HRTF signal for headphones. So if the games engine is sending TrueAudio broken positional data it doesn't have the capabilities to change it.

The main benefit of the hardware acceleration, is it will allow developers to be a bit more liberal with the available audio effects within their chosen engine. Thief for example, is supposed to use the convolution reverb within Wwise once the TrueAudio patch is released. To me however, it won't be a noticeable upgrade from a proper algorithmic reverb in most circumstances.

So unless EM fixes Thief's audio issues within Wwise or Unreal 3, it will remain equally broken for TrueAudio and software users.

EAX is nothing like TrueAudio. TrueAudio doesn't use preset reverbs. It actually calculates the 3D environment

Unfortunately, it does not do that. It has all of the exact same limitations of FMOD and Wwise, since it sources all of it's audio from them. So unless a new audio engine gets developed that uses ray tracing, or one of the existing engines adds such functionality, we won't be getting it.

 

[3DVagabond]

So it's more akin to Ray Tracing, like A3D was?

I still fondly remember the days when choosing a soundcard was down to more than SNR/Distortion levels.

I'm sure it would still be easy enough to make a non GPU bound solution, the properties of each surface would still have to be tagged at the point of level design so although it might add a little more overhead you could still apply this to the geometry and send it over the PCIe bus to an add-in card that supports TrueAudio for it to calculate. Maybe with a little additional overhead but most likely worth it.

There hasn't been a lot released as to how the variables like surface reflectivity, absorption, muffling... are done. Audio raytracing is the best description of it I can come up with myself. Exactly how evolved it's going to be, they haven't said. They have said that it would bottleneck a cpu badly trying to run all the calculations, so it has to be pretty compute intensive and, if it works well on a GPU, highly parallel.

 

[3DVagabond]

TrueAudio can't address those issues in it's current state. It plugs into existing game audio engines like FMOD and Wwise, it doesn't replace them, so they still use their own positional audio and effects. What TrueAudio will do is run them with hardware acceleration and translate the games 3D sound output into an HRTF signal for headphones. So if the games engine is sending TrueAudio broken positional data it doesn't have the capabilities to change it.

The main benefit of the hardware acceleration, is it will allow developers to be a bit more liberal with the available audio effects within their chosen engine. Thief for example, is supposed to use the convolution reverb within Wwise once the TrueAudio patch is released. To me however, it won't be a noticeable upgrade from a proper algorithmic reverb in most circumstances.

So unless EM fixes Thief's audio issues within Wwise or Unreal 3, it will remain equally broken for TrueAudio and software users.

I don't believe you are right. When the Thief patch comes out, we'll see.

 

[motsm]

I don't believe you are right. When the Thief patch comes out, we'll see.

As far as public knowledge about TrueAudio goes, no ray tracing engine currently exists in relation to it. I did a lot of research into TrueAudio and it's affiliates and found they licensed their HRTF algorithm from GenAudio, and the convolution reverb they advertised is the one within Wwise, which uses impulse responses from AudioEase. In the hour+ long presentation I watched, they never once mention ray tracing capabilities, none of the affiliated audio engines have such capabilities, and none of my other research has ever uncovered any such thing existing. As for Thief specifically, EM had a developer talk about what TrueAudio will add to Thief, and the convolution reverb is the only thing he brought up.

I was hoping TrueAudio was going to offer ray tracing as well, which is why I did so much research. It's just unfortunately not the case.