AMD TrueAudio support in games?

[motsm]

I think more could be done though by sampling real 3D environments that you could simply program the objects into. It's the way DSP's have handled it in the past. I'm not an expert though. I could be wrong.

Convolution reverb is exactly that, recordings taken from real environments, and that is what Thief uses. Unless I misunderstood you?

 

[Blitzvogel]

I remember buying a Creative X-Gamer Sound Card specifically for EAX in BF2, 2142, and FEAR. It was so worth it when playing in 5.1.

I currently have an Asus Xonar DS that does emulate some of the EAX effects, but not to the same kind of extent actual Creative hardware does.

 

[3DVagabond]

Convolution reverb is exactly that, recordings taken from real environments, and that is what Thief uses. Unless I misunderstood you?

Sorry. Yes, that is what I meant. I'm not sure where Thief screws it up, then? Unless they simply messed with the amplitude to make it more obvious and didn't have actual content that would represent it well? My card doesn't support Trueaudio, so I can't say 1st hand.

 

[Headfoot]

Sorry. Yes, that is what I meant. I'm not sure where Thief screws it up, then? Unless they simply messed with the amplitude to make it more obvious and didn't have actual content that would represent it well? My card doesn't support Trueaudio, so I can't say 1st hand.

If I had to guess I'd say they have too few impulse responses recorded so that the size of the recorded room doesn't match the size of the simulated room, that and I think they've made the reflections too loud

 

[motsm]

Sorry. Yes, that is what I meant. I'm not sure where Thief screws it up, then? Unless they simply messed with the amplitude to make it more obvious and didn't have actual content that would represent it well? My card doesn't support Trueaudio, so I can't say 1st hand.

I can't judge it first hand either, but I haven't heard anything good about it.

I think I said this in another TrueAudio thread, but I was a bit concerned using convolution reverb in a game wouldn't work out that well. With a traditional algorithmic reverb that is completely generated by delays and filters you can tune dozens of settings to make it sound like nearly any environment a game designer might create. A convolution reverb on the other hand gives you a few presets that while more realistic to the environments they represent, are almost static, and can't be heavily tweaked and tuned. Convolution reverb works great for audio production work in movies and music where there is no user interaction, but a medium like gaming calls for a much more dynamic reverb, so convolution is the opposite of what you want.

That said, it sounds like EM likely screwed up their implementation of it as well.

 

[Headfoot]

I can't judge it first hand either, but I haven't heard anything good about it.

I think I said this in another TrueAudio thread, but I was a bit concerned using convolution reverb in a game wouldn't work out that well. With a traditional algorithmic reverb that is completely generated by delays and filters you can tune dozens of settings to make it sound like nearly any environment a game designer might create. A convolution reverb on the other hand gives you a few presets that while more realistic to the environments they represent, are almost static, and can't be heavily tweaked and tuned. Convolution reverb works great for audio production work in movies and music where there is no user interaction, but a medium like gaming calls for a much more dynamic reverb, so convolution is the opposite of what you want.

That said, it sounds like EM likely screwed up their implementation of it as well.

That's a great point. I gotta say that it seems like convolution reverb is more of a checkbox feature than really any important step forward in gaming. The sound-ray-casting approach seems like a better use of cycles and dev time to be honest

 

[imaheadcase]

Not true.

TrueAudio is 2+1 Tensilica DSPs that can run very particular runtimes significantly faster than a general purpose CPU could. That's literally the purpose of a DSP.

You can do -the general algorithm- in software. You can't do anywhere near as many iterations, with as much resolution, from as many sources, or otherwise increase the scope of the effect, when you run it on CPU. So, you can't do the same thing in software. You can only do a low res approximation of the same thing in software. A parallel example is that the 360 can run Crysis 3 sure, but it's not anywhere near the same visual fidelity as on the PC version. Same basic idea here

In real life it doesn't matter that TrueAudio is computationally superior in specific contexts. Developers would rather spend developer time and money on making the graphics better, adding levels, content, optimization, 95 times out of 100 instead of adding advanced sound. They must not see enough demand for it, so no one takes the time to program the more advanced effects. So the discussion is pretty much theoretical since the economics of it don't work out. Chicken and the egg

Umm nope. You know why all hardware sound solutions die? because software can do it better with modern CPU. The "general algorithm" is it. You want better audio then convince people to get a loan for a home theater setup and THX theater. Simply putting it in hardware is not going to help anything.

 

[Despoiler]

Umm nope. You know why all hardware sound solutions die? because software can do it better with modern CPU. The "general algorithm" is it. You want better audio then convince people to get a loan for a home theater setup and THX theater. Simply putting it in hardware is not going to help anything.

The modern CPU in gaming is under competition for resources from several types of calculations. Audio isn't as important as the graphics, physics, or AI calculations. Also, your audio processing has to be designed for the lowest common denominator CPU. That means the sound you could do isn't what you can do without severely restraining your supported hardware configs, which in turn lowers your potential buyers.

 

[Headfoot]

Umm nope. You know why all hardware sound solutions die? because software can do it better with modern CPU. The "general algorithm" is it. You want better audio then convince people to get a loan for a home theater setup and THX theater. Simply putting it in hardware is not going to help anything.

What does THX have to do with anything? It is an undeniable fact that DSPs process digital signals faster than CPUs. It is undeniable fact that DSPs are used everywhere, they are NOT dying in any sense of the word. Almost every motherboard, smartphone, digital sound device of any variety has a DSP on it in some part of the chain. The DSP market is in the process of heating up and becoming more competitive now because of increased demand... if you were aware of any of this you would not have made the comment you did.

Here's a great example of a hardware DSP solution dying off: The Axe FX. Oh wait, no. They're immensely popular. Kemper Profiling Amp, PodHD line, Eleven Rack... Strange, a proliferation of products in the last 7-8 years. That sounds an awful lot like an exploding and proliferating market. All of them are based on DSPs and even advertise when they upgrade the DSPs

 

[kasakka]

What does THX have to do with anything? It is an undeniable fact that DSPs process digital signals faster than CPUs. It is undeniable fact that DSPs are used everywhere, they are NOT dying in any sense of the word. Almost every motherboard, smartphone, digital sound device of any variety has a DSP on it in some part of the chain. The DSP market is in the process of heating up and becoming more competitive now because of increased demand... if you were aware of any of this you would not have made the comment you did.

Here's a great example of a hardware DSP solution dying off: The Axe FX. Oh wait, no. They're immensely popular. Kemper Profiling Amp, PodHD line, Eleven Rack... Strange, a proliferation of products in the last 7-8 years. That sounds an awful lot like an exploding and proliferating market. All of them are based on DSPs and even advertise when they upgrade the DSPs

The units you mention are largely still aimed at a far smaller market (musicians) than what used to be the market for consumer soundcards. Now the only reason to buy a soundcard for the gamer is really to get better sound quality via analog output as few companies seem to put any real effort into game audio. With digital output all that matters is what is at the amp and speaker end so if anything, processing is moving to amps themselves (mostly for room correction for now).

Don't take me wrong, I've been an Axe-Fx user for years now and it's a great piece of kit (with a terrible user interface), but even in the music production DSP side there seems to be barely any movement. The Axe-Fx uses the most powerful DSPs on the market and those are still only dual core units, nobody seems to make quad core DSPs and new products seem to be slow to appear on the market.

 

[BrightCandle]

If all we do is bit of reverb and basic HRTF calculation then there isn't a lot of need for anything but software.

But if instead we start talking about casting rays of sound, bouncing them off the walls and terrain and impacting the sound in semi realistic ways based on the material well then we get into the territory where a CPU just isn't going to be quick. We could very easily consume a lot of power trying to produce realistic world sounds. We can't blame the sorry state of hardware on anything but a software interface that doesn't really support anything better and a lot of games companies doing nothing with TrueAudio. It could be a really exciting technology and we could get some really cool things out of it, right now however its disappointing and no one is doing anything impressive enough to convince people hardware is worth it, that is a shame.

 

[Atreidin]

If all we do is bit of reverb and basic HRTF calculation then there isn't a lot of need for anything but software.

But if instead we start talking about casting rays of sound, bouncing them off the walls and terrain and impacting the sound in semi realistic ways based on the material well then we get into the territory where a CPU just isn't going to be quick. We could very easily consume a lot of power trying to produce realistic world sounds. We can't blame the sorry state of hardware on anything but a software interface that doesn't really support anything better and a lot of games companies doing nothing with TrueAudio. It could be a really exciting technology and we could get some really cool things out of it, right now however its disappointing and no one is doing anything impressive enough to convince people hardware is worth it, that is a shame.

Even worse, if some forum posts are indicative of gamer sentiment, we have a large contingent of gamers who aren't just apathetic to better sound, they are actively against it. They refuse to believe there could be any real, significant improvements and for some reason waste time trying to convince others of their beliefs in an effort to ensure that we get crap sound for as long as possible. Maybe they genuinely can't tell when good positional audio is in effect and it isn't just their stubbornness to giving it a real shot, but many of us can, and it sucks that these people are impeding progress.

 

[ViRGE]

The modern CPU in gaming is under competition for resources from several types of calculations. Audio isn't as important as the graphics, physics, or AI calculations. Also, your audio processing has to be designed for the lowest common denominator CPU. That means the sound you could do isn't what you can do without severely restraining your supported hardware configs, which in turn lowers your potential buyers.

This I feel is a great point that shouldn't be overshadowed. Titanfall for the PC shipped something on the order of 30GB of uncompressed audio simply because they couldn't afford the trivial CPU time of decoding that audio. That's around 25GB of extra data downloaded and extra hard drive space occupied just to get around CPU performance deficits on the low-end. And if they aren't even willing to use compressed audio, you can be sure they aren't allocating CPU time to a good audio simulation either.

 

[3DVagabond]

Even worse, if some forum posts are indicative of gamer sentiment, we have a large contingent of gamers who aren't just apathetic to better sound, they are actively against it. They refuse to believe there could be any real, significant improvements and for some reason waste time trying to convince others of their beliefs in an effort to ensure that we get crap sound for as long as possible. Maybe they genuinely can't tell when good positional audio is in effect and it isn't just their stubbornness to giving it a real shot, but many of us can, and it sucks that these people are impeding progress.

That's just the typical, if AMD makes it it sucks crowd.

AMD hasn't done anything to really promote Trueaudio yet. One game, just to say it's been used, and not exactly an impressive implementation at that. They get some resources behind it so it's well represented in a game and people will like it. Also doesn't help that the high profile devs they've used so far to represent their new initiatives are only really interested in Mantle.

 

[Blitzvogel]

Both new consoles and the Wii U have DSPs (probably TrueAudio for PS4, Xbone), so that goes to show that it's still something highly valued.

 

[MeldarthX]

That's just the typical, if AMD makes it it sucks crowd.

AMD hasn't done anything to really promote Trueaudio yet. One game, just to say it's been used, and not exactly an impressive implementation at that. They get some resources behind it so it's well represented in a game and people will like it. Also doesn't help that the high profile devs they've used so far to represent their new initiatives are only really interested in Mantle.

Murder: Soul Suspect also uses True Audio....so we have two games; Star Citizen has said they will use it along with Lichdom.

 

[3DVagabond]

Murder: Soul Suspect also uses True Audio....so we have two games; Star Citizen has said they will use it along with Lichdom.

Is it actually in Murder: SS yet, or is it to be added in later?

 

[monstercameron]

Is it actually in Murder: SS yet, or is it to be added in later?

added later? didn't the company dissolve?

 

[MeldarthX]

Is it actually in Murder: SS yet, or is it to be added in later?

wiki says it is; I can't check their website as I'm at work I throughly enjoyed the game; one of the better murder mystery adventure games I've played in a long time......I wish it was longer would be only complaint......

 

[motsm]

wiki says it is; I can't check their website as I'm at work I throughly enjoyed the game; one of the better murder mystery adventure games I've played in a long time......I wish it was longer would be only complaint......

I'd be curious if it actually does more than dump the standard Wwise effects onto the DSP, like Thief.