Ubuntu Desires Lower Audio Latency For Gaming

[psycho_driver]

That results in the game taking exclusive control of the card. Nothing else will be audible. Which is a disaster. Unless you talk to the dmix device. In that case, you're back to high latency.

I've never had my dmix setup induce audio stuttering into games/other highly cpu intensive apps like PA does every other time.

[psycho_driver]

Would it be possible to just bypass pulseaudio and talk directly to ALSA when playing games?

I'm sorry to any PA developers but it's a steaming pile of crap. Ubuntu would be much better off ditching it and working on auto configuration utilities for ALSA.

[gamerk2]

This is an utterly incorrect analogy, the visual cortex and auditory cortex of the brain work completely differently. As for the brain being able to separate out individual sounds - it's very fast. If someone clicks their fingers next to your ear, you know it's right next to your ear; if someone does it 10m away, you know it's 10m away - how? Because your brain 'measures' the time difference between reflections of the same signal as they take different paths down the ear canal (after bouncing off the folds of the outer ear), that's why you full 'surround' hearing despite only having two ears.

If you're recording sound on a PC, and monitoring whilst playing (the usual setup), anything over 10ms becomes noticeable. Gaming can a have a slightly higher latency because your brain will tie together the visual information with auditory, and at 60Hz that's ~17ms before the sound is heard a single frame after it should have been.

I agree. Audio latency is much easier to distinguish then video latency. And audio *should* be kept, at worse, in sync with Video output, meaning a latency < 16.67ms. Although less then 10 or so would be desirable.

[gamerk2]

Take a look on Windows:

Windows XP: hardware mixing
Windows 7: change to software mixing which cause serious latency problem http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iujDVsg_2xY
Windows 8: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/libr.../br259116.aspx they realize their mistake and go back to hardware mixing again

I wonder those PA developers will follow the stupid Microsoft again?

To be fair, it made sense to re-design the Directsound stack as of Vista; it WAS getting on in years. And other audio API's (OpenAL, etc) were still H/W accelerated, just not directsound.

Problem is, XAudio2 basically beat out OpenAL as the API of choice, so OpenAL is basically dead on Windows at this point.

[curaga]

Again, people like to pick on Lennart Poettering but at least he actively tries to DO SOMETHING to fix up the Linux desktop, rather than just yakking over and over.

Yay, flamebaiting! Name one thing he has fixed, instead of made worse.

[cbamber85]

You know sound is a considerable slower media than light. Your brain can't even tell apart single pictures if they are shown within 16ms, most people can't even at 40ms. If you have a really trained ear you'll be able to tell apart sounds with 10ms latency, but I doubt [b]you[/] are able to do so. Just remember 25ms is the latency of the sound from a piano standing 10m away from you. Can you really tell the latency between the pianist triggering the string and you hearing it?

This is an utterly incorrect analogy, the visual cortex and auditory cortex of the brain work completely differently. As for the brain being able to separate out individual sounds - it's very fast. If someone clicks their fingers next to your ear, you know it's right next to your ear; if someone does it 10m away, you know it's 10m away - how? Because your brain 'measures' the time difference between reflections of the same signal as they take different paths down the ear canal (after bouncing off the folds of the outer ear), that's why you full 'surround' hearing despite only having two ears.

If you're recording sound on a PC, and monitoring whilst playing (the usual setup), anything over 10ms becomes noticeable. Gaming can a have a slightly higher latency because your brain will tie together the visual information with auditory, and at 60Hz that's ~17ms before the sound is heard a single frame after it should have been.

[RealNC]

you are talking about OSS. With ALSA multiple programs can access the sound card.

No, they cannot. You're confusing the dmix device with the hardware device.

[bwat47]

That seems like the only benefit for the *average* user, but pretty much no *average* user is ever going to modify per-application volume in this way. A "hack" to allow the volume control applet to directly modify volumes exposed from applications would let us get this benefit, while keeping the stack just ALSA.

We should go forward, not backwards. Yeah, lets ditch pulseaudio for alsa and some ridiculous hacks!

[Lynxeye]

The human ear (on average) can detect just a few ms. 25ms is unacceptable for any real/classically trained piano/keyboard player. You are talking about significantly higher latencies than a real piano has, how you can claim you don't notice it is, laughably nutz.

also, it entirely depends on which HDA it is. Some are crappier than others. I have one in my old dell laptop that has an intelHDA that doesn't start dishing out xruns until i get it to 1ms, but it was quite comfortable around 2ms.

cheerz

You know sound is a considerable slower media than light. Your brain can't even tell apart single pictures if they are shown within 16ms, most people can't even at 40ms. If you have a really trained ear you'll be able to tell apart sounds with 10ms latency, but I doubt [b]you[/] are able to do so. Just remember 25ms is the latency of the sound from a piano standing 10m away from you. Can you really tell the latency between the pianist triggering the string and you hearing it?

Bringing down latency to the technical minimum is just a waste of energy for the sake of some retards that use the latency numbers as a kind of benchmark.

[Lattyware]

Would it be possible to just bypass pulseaudio and talk directly to ALSA when playing games?

And loose all the benefits of PulseAudio? I don't get why people still hate PA, it's a great bit of software that does really cool stuff - it's perfect for gamers. Sure, it could do with some latency reduction, apparently, but that doesn't mean it's bad as a thing to have. PA can do stuff like assign certain audio streams to certain output devices really easily - for example, send chat to my headphones and game audio to my speakers - that is really useful for gamers.