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Steam Audio 2.0 Adds AMD TrueAudio Next Support

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  • #21
    Originally posted by dfx. View Post
    Too bad that Radeons have shitty 16 bit 48khz HDA DACs on them Even my MB's HDA is 24b/192khz.
    Or does it offload prepared output stream on any current default DAC ?
    Too bad 99.9% of humans cannot hear sounds above 22khz with makes anything over 44khz redundant or you would of had a point.

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    • #22
      Originally posted by starshipeleven View Post
      This type of feature is far too heavy for soundcard hardware. Any complex enhancement provided by soundcard drivers is in fact mostly running on the CPU even now.

      A soudcard only has the hardware to convert digital audio to analog, amplifiers for headphone jacks, and maybe do some mixing in hardware or similar relatively basic things.
      I understand that - I was suggesting a new generation of soundcards to be made with a processor powerful enough to handle something like Trueaudio. But, I understand how I wasn't totally clear on that.

      Originally posted by Rallos Zek View Post
      Too bad 99.9% of humans cannot hear sounds above 22khz with makes anything over 44khz redundant or you would of had a point.
      The frequency in this context is referring to sample rate, which is not necessarily the same thing as the frequency of the sound wave itself, though to my understanding the sample rate does limit that too. That being said, you can tell the difference between a 96KHz sample rate and a 44.1KHz sample rate (CD audio quality), depending on the audio track. In most cases 48KHz is plenty good enough and you're really only going to notice a difference if you're looking for one. I have a very hard time believing anyone can tell the difference between 96KHz and 192KHz, except maybe in synthetic tests.

      Think of it like this:
      Sample rate is like the audio equivalent of screen resolution while bit depth is the audio equivalent of color depth.
      Last edited by schmidtbag; 11 February 2018, 11:19 AM.

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      • #23
        Originally posted by humbug View Post
        Radeon GPUs have DACs on them?
        Originally posted by starshipeleven View Post
        I don't know where you got this info, but I don't think the GPUs have a DAC at all.

        a DAC is the chip that translates the digital stream into analog, so you can attach a jack to speakers or headphones. No GPU I know of has any headphone/stereo jack on it.


        If you are using the GPU's HDMI or Displayport connections, then the audio stream is sent over to the other device, and it's the receiving device's DAC that does the job.

        In case the receiving device you are using has shitty DAC, you can buy an AV receiver with HDMI port so it can take the digital audio from the cable (and then from its second HDMI port it will send a mute video stream to the TV)
        like these high-end ones used by people with home theaters: https://hometheaterreview.com/hdmi-a...d-information/
        Then how exactly do you call that ?

        Code:
        % lspci | grep -i audio
        00:14.2 Audio device: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] SBx00 Azalia (Intel HDA) (rev 40)
        01:00.1 Audio device: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Ellesmere [Radeon RX 580]
        Code:
        % cat /proc/asound/card0/codec\#0| head
        Codec: Realtek ALC889
        Address: 0
        AFG Function Id: 0x1 (unsol 1)
        Vendor Id: 0x10ec0889
        Subsystem Id: 0x1458a132
        Revision Id: 0x100004
        No Modem Function Group found
        Default PCM:
            rates [0x5f0]: 32000 44100 48000 88200 96000 192000
            bits [0xe]: 16 20 24
        Code:
        % cat /proc/asound/card1/codec\#0| head
        Codec: ATI R6xx HDMI
        Address: 0
        AFG Function Id: 0x1 (unsol 0)
        Vendor Id: 0x1002aa01
        Subsystem Id: 0x00aa0100
        Revision Id: 0x100700
        No Modem Function Group found
        Default PCM:
            rates [0x70]: 32000 44100 48000
            bits [0x2]: 16
        Maybe it doesn't have actual DAC part but it only encodes in this shitty format while getting audio from the system and that's what you'll get on any output device via DP and HDMI, no matter what it may have.

        Originally posted by Rallos Zek View Post

        Too bad 99.9% of humans cannot hear sounds above 22khz with makes anything over 44khz redundant or you would of had a point.
        Ever heard of "sampling rate", moron ?

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        • #24
          Originally posted by dfx. View Post

          Ever heard of "sampling rate", moron ?
          I just leave this link to a rant here for your consumption: https://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html

          192kHz digital music files offer no benefits. They're not quite neutral either; practical fidelity is slightly worse. The ultrasonics are a liability during playback.


          And to summarize what I've written in an other thread - 24-bit/192kHz is nice for your pet bat or dolphin.

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          • #25
            Originally posted by dfx. View Post
            Maybe it doesn't have actual DAC part but it only encodes in this shitty format while getting audio from the system and that's what you'll get on any output device via DP and HDMI, no matter what it may have.
            There are a few things in HDMI audio:
            1) The edid of the attached monitor (which is entirely processed by software), which indicates what sound capabilities it has.
            2) The limiting factor of the video card.
            If you could have just inserted bitstreams into an HDMI stream, you could have created any audio stream/standard you want, as long as you have your packets ready.
            Unfortunately almost all hdmi encoders seems to have the need to limit this, and somehow interface this stuff with "codecs".
            It's an expensive way of creating audio packets.
            The net result is that all the radeon HDMI audio that I know of only support 2 channel LPCM, no pass through, or 6 or 8 channel LPCM.
            It was even so bad that some of our (company) motherboards needed a *license key* to be able to do hdmi audio out on a radeon, and that was only possible with fglrx drivers.
            Nvidia seems to have better support. But all in all, PC video card vendors have a very limited support for HDMI anyway. Just try to use CEC...
            But yes, there are "no" analog parts in HDMI or DP.
            I always used a soundblaster for the multichannel audio. The live had a programmable semi dsp, and default mixed a lot of PCM channels into multiple analog channels.
            When somebody decided that pulseaudio was a good idea, it largely frustrated the hardware accelerated audio mixing. At least it makes it possible to have both pulseaudio and jackd active, without pulseaudio eating 100% cpu.

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            • #26
              Originally posted by Ferdinand View Post
              What I am getting at is that with games CPU cores are much more difficult to fill than GPU cores. There are always too little GPU cores but CPU cores are almost never 100% filled. This is the same problem as putting physics on the GPU instead of the CPU. The best games use about 4 tot 6 threads on the CPU. That is fine for i7 4790 and i5 8400 but what do you do with Ryzen 1700 16 threads?
              You're absolutely correct!
              The reason it it so, is because it's harder to use more than one thread on a processor using 'old' APIs like OpenGL and DX11 (and older).
              With Vulkan/DX12 it's easier to use more threads, though it's harder to code using those APIs than to code for DX11 (and older).
              Now the developers have the tools to better make use of the avaliable threads. Let's hope they use them wisely

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