Steam Audio 2.0 Adds AMD TrueAudio Next Support

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Steam Audio 2.0 Adds AMD TrueAudio Next Support

Valve has added support for the AMD/GPUOpen TrueAudio Next within the latest beta of SteamAudio 2.0...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Steam-Audio-TrueAudio-Next

[Adarion]

Humm, it sucks that TrueAudio Next isn't an ASIC. So it uses CUs of the GPU. And possibly slows down rendering (depends on the number of CUs reserved). And probably uses more electric power than some highly specified ASIC.

On the other hand it is great that it is NOT an ASIC and seems to do things via standardized OpenCL. Cause that doesn't need an extra driver, it is more flexible in the long term than an ASIC and it might be even become a vendor independent standard. All modern GPUs should be able to do some OpenCL. Nobody would be required to integrate some extra-ASIC and have special know-how. So even e.g. Nv, intel and others could participate and we might have some industry-wide standard.

Or do I miss something here?

[PackRat]

Yaakuro having fun shows off his patch of Steam Audio plugin on youtube : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xBL__q6wuvY&t=209s

[M@GOid]

Too bad that audio is a very low priority with games on Linux right now. Most games only have stereo, when their Windows version have full support for surround sound. Even Valve games (like L4D2) have a broken implementation on most systems. And S/PDIF? sure, if you like sound lag... when it works, obviously.

[Spazturtle]

Too bad that audio is a very low priority with games on Linux right now. Most games only have stereo, when their Windows version have full support for surround sound. Even Valve games (like L4D2) have a broken implementation on most systems. And S/PDIF? sure, if you like sound lag... when it works, obviously.

The surround sound they have on Windows is very basic though, it isn't positional, which is what trueaudio aims to solve.

[Ferdinand]

How much processing power do you need for trueaudio? Is it too much for one CPU core? Is a GPU much better for audio than a CPU core?

[nomadewolf]

How much processing power do you need for trueaudio? Is it too much for one CPU core? Is a GPU much better for audio than a CPU core?

My guess is that it will depend on what each game implements. Just Stereo: very few power. 7.1 positional surround: a bit more. But nothing a decent GPU can't handle, i expect...

[Ferdinand]

My guess is that it will depend on what each game implements. Just Stereo: very few power. 7.1 positional surround: a bit more. But nothing a decent GPU can't handle, i expect...

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?

[Zan Lynx]

The surround sound they have on Windows is very basic though, it isn't positional, which is what trueaudio aims to solve.

Most games on Windows do pretty good positional audio. I have a Logitech and a Razer headset that both claim "7.1 surround sound" and they appear to deliver. I can definitely tell if a gunshot was ahead or behind me in The Division, for example. Other games too.

Maybe they use OpenAL. Who knows?

Unless you mean "real positional audio" instead of surround sound. But even people who want "the real thing" don't usually actually want it. The real thing involves hours of tediously testing speaker positioning, wave reflections, interference patterns, etc.

[schmidtbag]

This is one of those things that could've breathed new life into soundcards. But oh well - I didn't want to buy a discrete one for this feature anyway.