AMD true audio technology, game changer?

[hidd3n]

AMD's new "true audio" technology might give us a boost in audio quality in games 
- what I'm concerned about is that it's the game developer that got to make it better (audio engines etc.). 
Do you guys think that developers will use this technology in a great extent, or will it just be some games that's marked as "optimazed for AMD" ?
As far as I know, It won't affect watching movies etc, and won't work as an sound card "replacement" in any sense. 

It seems to me like this will just be a technology AMD puts in their card for no use, so any thoughts?

(English is not my first language, so sorry for the bad writing )

[IdeaStormer]

Will be funny to see if Linus will warm up to it or stick to his Dedicated Sound Card theory. I doubt it will be better than true audio.

[Vitalius]

AMD's new "true audio" technology might give us a boost in audio quality in games 

- what I'm concerned about is that it's the game developer that got to make it better (audio engines etc.). 

Do you guys think that developers will use this technology in a great extent, or will it just be some games that's marked as "optimazed for AMD" ?

As far as I know, It won't affect watching movies etc, and won't work as an sound card "replacement" in any sense. 

It seems to me like this will just be a technology AMD puts in their card for no use, so any thoughts?

(English is not my first language, so sorry for the bad writing )

Every developer better use it. They explained it as "Drag and drop, turn it on, and it works." 

If it is that simple, really, then they would be dumb not to use it. Like, seriously. 

[KaareKanin]

Will be funny to see if Linus will warm up to it or stick to his Dedicated Sound Card theory. I doubt it will be better than true audio.

 

The way I understand this stuff is that it in no way will do what you want from a sound card. Normal digital processing of audio can be done perfectly fine by almost anything. It's the transition from digital signals to analogue signals that is the problem, that and the treatment of those signals. 

 

What the AMD guys are doing is introducing some fancy processing and algorithms for gaming audio which will be unloaded to the HW in the selected supported cards. I highly doubt they have built any kind of analogue signal processing into the cards. That's why I think the likes of Linus will never replace sound cards with a GPU doing signal processing. 

[DenVu]

i dont think its a game changer isnt it more like improved audio over hdmi or something?

[Vitalius]

i dont think its a game changer isnt it more like improved audio over hdmi or something?

Nope. That is not what it does at all. 

Imagine you are walking through a city and you bump into a barrel. And said barrel is filled with liquid, but only to 60%. The echo of the noise as it travels through the various materials will change based on how much liquid is in the barrel, what you bump into it with (a gun versus your foot), etc. 

That is the kind of thing they are adding. Plus how the sound actually sounds depending on where it occurs. It is basically adding physics, to sound. Like if I yell in a big Cathedral, that crap is gonna echo something fierce. Or in a sewer. 

Things like that. Basically, it makes the sound situtional, so it never sounds the same like it usually does. Where the same "audio clip" is played over and over, even if the situation is different. If I open a chest in a dungeon versus in an open field (for RPGs), the sound will be different. Depending on the layout of the room (or lack thereof) depending where I am.

[DenVu]

Nope. That is not what it does at all. 

Imagine you are walking through a city and you bump into a barrel. And said barrel is filled with liquid, but only to 60%. The echo of the noise as it travels through the various materials will change based on how much liquid is in the barrel, what you bump into it with (a gun versus your foot), etc. 

That is the kind of thing they are adding. Plus how the sound actually sounds depending on where it occurs. It is basically adding physics, to sound. Like if I yell in a big Cathedral, that crap is gonna echo something fierce. Or in a sewer. 

Things like that. Basically, it makes the sound situtional, so it never sounds the same like it usually does. Where the same "audio clip" is played over and over, even if the situation is different. If I open a chest in a dungeon versus in an open field (for RPGs), the sound will be different. Depending on the layout of the room (or lack thereof) depending where I am.

i see isnt this what a game engine is supposed to do though ?

[Vitalius]

i see isnt this what a game engine is supposed to do though ?

Basically, but I have never heard of an engine that actually does this. Plus, if the game engine DID do this, it would most likely be CPU bound. Whereas, AMD has some special setup on their new GPUs to handle it, so that way you get less of a performance hit with something that is this complicated. 

[DenVu]

Basically, but I have never heard of an engine that actually does this. Plus, if the game engine DID do this, it would most likely be CPU bound. Whereas, AMD has some special setup on their new GPUs to handle it, so that way you get less of a performance hit with something that is this complicated. 

like how shadowplay is supposed to releave the cpu? well i guess it sounds cool if devs would take advantage of this then i hope that they make so nvidia owners can run it of their cpu

[h264]

All the things described by the presentation can be done with the CPU, so why would anyone use a proprietary graphics card engine to create these effects?  It doesn't make any sense, even simple surround effects are immersive and convincing.

 

However, if the new thing is to render the surround sound off the video card and output that over HDMI/another audio output, and Nvidia followed suit and it became an industry standard, that would finally kill dedicated surround sound cards for good.

[MayflowerElectronics]

All the things described by the presentation can be done with the CPU, so why would anyone use a proprietary graphics card engine to create these effects? It doesn't make any sense, even simple surround effects are immersive and convincing.

However, if the new thing is to render the surround sound off the video card and output that over HDMI/another audio output, and Nvidia followed suit and it became an industry standard, that would finally kill dedicated surround sound cards for good.

Marketing. Since 99% of the population has no clue on how audio works, it's just another thing to list on the features.

[KaareKanin]

I also think that a part of the appeal is that you have dedicated resources to do this processing now, which will free up the CPU for more important stuff. I'm no expert, but I think that at the level of sound processing these guys talk about, not relying on CPU might be wise.

@h264 @MayflowerElectronics

[ShearMe]

Marketing. Since 99% of the population has no clue on how audio works, it's just another thing to list on the features.

 

Probably the most in depth explanation of how it works that I've read yet! AMD didn't really go into any significant detail in the stream, so one can only guess it is bollocks (and I'm American).

[Turkatron]

Nope. That is not what it does at all. 

Imagine you are walking through a city and you bump into a barrel. And said barrel is filled with liquid, but only to 60%. The echo of the noise as it travels through the various materials will change based on how much liquid is in the barrel, what you bump into it with (a gun versus your foot), etc. 

That is the kind of thing they are adding. Plus how the sound actually sounds depending on where it occurs. It is basically adding physics, to sound. Like if I yell in a big Cathedral, that crap is gonna echo something fierce. Or in a sewer. 

Things like that. Basically, it makes the sound situtional, so it never sounds the same like it usually does. Where the same "audio clip" is played over and over, even if the situation is different. If I open a chest in a dungeon versus in an open field (for RPGs), the sound will be different. Depending on the layout of the room (or lack thereof) depending where I am.

os muhc sound

hering is bleiving

shibe_dog_amd_true_audio.jpg

[hidd3n]

i see isnt this what a game engine is supposed to do though ?

AMD thinks that this new technology will make developors make better engine, for sound. game engine/gaming sound engine. So the technology is allowing the developors to make better engine, basically. This requires the game develpors to actually do so, or else it's just technology and money up in smoke. My concern is that game develepors won't really use it, and if they use it - will the CPU load go up on NVIDIA owners.

[mr moose]

I thought it was simply a dynamic version of Creative's eax?

 

I had one of creatives EAX cards (SB live 5.1). The dsp could add effects on the fly make it sound like any environment you wanted. The problem was it was not dynamic so either everything sounded like a clay cave or every thing sound like an aircraft hanger and that was it.  With this new device it is supposed to change the effect depending on the game environment.

 

I think it will improve the game immersion, however like other technologies such as IMX expansion, Channel separation and dynamic processors, eventually it will be built into the game engine and there won't be a need for it to be either in the sound device or video card.

 

I used to use my SB live as an effects pedal for my guitar because it was not much good for anything else.

[Hazy125]

Here's my two cents on the topic, bear in mind that I know virtually nothing about audio. True audio isn't a replacement for a sound card as AMD'S solution doesn't do the same thing as a dedicated sound card. As far as I'm aware, at the simplest level, this just adds a greater spectrum of sounds. Which will be cool, but it won't increase audio quality as such. That's why you would still need a sound card. For the sound quality

[h264]

I also think that a part of the appeal is that you have dedicated resources to do this processing now, which will free up the CPU for more important stuff. I'm no expert, but I think that at the level of sound processing these guys talk about, not relying on CPU might be wise.

@h264 @MayflowerElectronics

 

So then why buy and overclock these $600 high-end CPUs in gaming rigs?  If this is the case we should all buy R9s and stick them in motherboards with AMD APUs since the CPU doesn't even matter anymore.

 

OH...

 

Here's my two cents on the topic, bear in mind that I know virtually nothing about audio. True audio isn't a replacement for a sound card as AMD'S solution doesn't do the same thing as a dedicated sound card. As far as I'm aware, at the simplest level, this just adds a greater spectrum of sounds. Which will be cool, but it won't increase audio quality as such. That's why you would still need a sound card. For the sound quality

 

What exactly is it that a sound card does that's different than what the R9's sound chip will do?  I'm pretty sure all the "spectrum of sounds" are covered by an onboard chip.  It's a surround audio processor, nothing groundbreaking about that.  These sorts of "effects" have been built into GOOD video games for the past 10 years.  Half-life comes to mind.

[KaareKanin]

So then why buy and overclock these $600 high-end CPUs in gaming rigs?  If this is the case we should all buy R9s and stick them in motherboards with AMD APUs since the CPU doesn't even matter anymore.

 

OH...

 

What exactly is it that a sound card does that's different than what the R9's sound chip will do?  I'm pretty sure all the "spectrum of sounds" are covered by an onboard chip.  It's a surround audio processor, nothing groundbreaking about that.  These sorts of "effects" have been built into GOOD video games for the past 10 years.  Half-life comes to mind.

 

I'm no big fan of this implementation either, if I were torn between two otherwise equal cards, this audio-stuff probably wouldn't help sway my decision towards the card that had it.

 

But to be clear, these cards will have hardware created for/certified for doing the sound processing required by "astoundsound" (I think it was). By doing this, they can guarantee the developers who develop with this solution in mind that they'll have enough compute performance available to run that specific audio mode. Yes, digital audio cover the spectrum, and if you take a pre mastered (i.e. audio recording) any modern solution on a MB would be able to digitally play it back. This sound mode, how ever, is supposed to make a different track for each sound you hear during game play, this track then has to be treated by various effects, and this real time, to reflect position, state, surroundings etc. Add enough tracks and effects, and it'll become a very compute-heavy task.

 

I spoke to a guy in a specialist musicians shop about acquiring a guitar-to-usb wire so that i could use my computer as an effect box for my guitar, saving me loads of space and money on expensive HW. This was some time ago, it must be said, and he told me that they had very briefly had these products in, but they wouldn't sell them anymore because there was just too much latency on them if you wanted to add, say a overdive or fuzz effect. So yes, there's more computing power nowadays, but to make it snappy and fast, latency free, you would have to lower bitrate and quality, or you would need HW processing. 

 

I would say it's all a bit like running a physX card. You can have the CPU do it, but to get the best results you would need a card do offload it to (be it the card you use for graphics, or a card that does nothing else in your system)

Or even better still, like on the fly video rendering. Unless you have h.264 HW encoding, you won't have the same performance as you would otherwise have. And better yet, if you have some kind of video rendering and effects software, you'll need a helluva CPU to do it real time. 

 

As for very expensive CPUs in a gaming rig, yep, they'll most likely be under utilized. There's normally quite a huge gap between what is considered gaming grade and what is considered enthusiast grade CPUs and motherboards. And i agree, paying over twice the price (or maybe even more) if all you want is gaming performance, is stupid.

 

All in all, i think the implementation is quite stupid. If nothing else, because people think they'll get better sound. Which is true for sound effects, but not for quality.

[ShearMe]

I spoke to a guy in a specialist musicians shop about acquiring a guitar-to-usb wire so that i could use my computer as an effect box for my guitar, saving me loads of space and money on expensive HW. This was some time ago, it must be said, and he told me that they had very briefly had these products in, but they wouldn't sell them anymore because there was just too much latency on them if you wanted to add, say a overdive or fuzz effect. So yes, there's more computing power nowadays, but to make it snappy and fast, latency free, you would have to lower bitrate and quality, or you would need HW processing. 

That's a problem lots of pro USB gear used to have, and it's independent of processing power. The processing they'll need for this new stuff is quite intensive, however, so thanks for all that clarification.

[mr moose]

I spoke to a guy in a specialist musicians shop about acquiring a guitar-to-usb wire so that i could use my computer as an effect box for my guitar, saving me loads of space and money on expensive HW. This was some time ago, it must be said, and he told me that they had very briefly had these products in, but they wouldn't sell them anymore because there was just too much latency on them if you wanted to add, say a overdive or fuzz effect. So yes, there's more computing power nowadays, but to make it snappy and fast, latency free, you would have to lower bitrate and quality, or you would need HW processing.

 

 

That's interesting because I am using an old creative usb card and have no latency issues. Prior to that I used an sb live 5.1 as an effects unit, again no latency.

 

The only time I have ever had latency issues is when I use basic signal monitoring programs inside of windows, as it adds another processing layer to the signal path.

 

EDIT: I am not disagreeing with you, I just found the advice you were given to be at odds with my experience. Maybe its the particular usb device they stocked.

[KaareKanin]

That's interesting because I am using an old creative usb card and have no latency issues. Prior to that I used an sb live 5.1 as an effects unit, again no latency.

 

The only time I have ever had latency issues is when I use basic signal monitoring programs inside of windows, as it adds another processing layer to the signal path.

 

EDIT: I am not disagreeing with you, I just found the advice you were given to be at odds with my experience. Maybe its the particular usb device they stocked.

I think you might have misunderstood ;-) the latency was introduced when the CPU tried to add effects to the guitar real time. It wasn't the USB itself that was the issue :-P digital audio stream over USB isn't a problem at all. Having software doing stuff to audio realtime without latency can be (thus dedicated HW processing of effects)

[mr moose]

I think you might have misunderstood ;-) the latency was introduced when the CPU tried to add effects to the guitar real time. It wasn't the USB itself that was the issue :-P digital audio stream over USB isn't a problem at all. Having software doing stuff to audio realtime without latency can be (thus dedicated HW processing of effects)

yes of course, sorry.  All my effects were run by hardware. which would be why I didn't have such problems. Except of course with the software I mentioned.

 

Now days it is not a problem I can assure you.The VST plugins for reaper are awesome.

[kuddlesworth9419]

This has already been done in some games already. i don't see why this will be any different to any other technology out their. I think in Bf3 and many others there are different sound assets generated from weather you are inside or outside. I know for certain in Arma 3 if you are in any enclosed space the sound is always different. I have a sound card though so that might be why. If it forces it for all games though then that would be cool. I love to hear great sounds in my games. Bf3 isn't good enough for me but Arma 3 is plenty good for me.

[Jack.EXE]

on SFF pcs? Yes, on full size? No.