Steam Audio 2.0 Adds AMD TrueAudio Next Support

[M@GOid]

There was some nice audio tech on late 90's to early 00's, but those got the axe after Windows Vista I guess.

Today I use a USB card, a Asus U5, after my motherboard audio connectors got bad because the way cables were hanging, also because now I can swap between speakers and a headphone with a push of a button, instead of destroying the headphone jack in front of the case.

On Youtube, there is a very nice sample of binaural sound. If they can do that in games I'm sold.

[AsuMagic]

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?

I would assume it's *much* cheaper to get software developers to do this on a GPU than to get hardware developers to design it and go through a very expensive process.
7CUs seems pretty ridiculously low compared to the amount of those a GPU has. That cost looks like it could be compensated more easily than it would be for an expensive CPU audio engine.

[pal666]

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.

i think this feature does not require any soundcard, discrete or builtin

[dfx.]

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 ?

[humbug]

Too bad that Radeons have shitty 16 bit 48khz HDA DACs on them Even my MB's HDA is 24b/192khz.

Radeon GPUs have DACs on them?

[starshipeleven]

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?

The point here is not "filling cores" for lulz, but running highly-parallelizable tasks on the GPU (which is a pretty good parallel task co-processor because of its main job requirements) because it's going to be much better than "filling CPU cores".

You can run physics on CPU and it WILL max out the cores used for it, but it will run like crap, while even a mediocre GPU will laugh at the same load.

Sound processing for anything beyond basic stereo is a highly parallelizable task, as it is basically another physics simulation algorithm. It makes sense to move it over to the GPU.

[starshipeleven]

Today I use a USB card, a Asus U5, after my motherboard audio connectors got bad because the way cables were hanging, also because now I can swap between speakers and a headphone with a push of a button, instead of destroying the headphone jack in front of the case.

+1 to this.
I have the ASUS U7 (still an external USB card, just a bit bigger), and it's great.

Quite frankly it makes 0 sense to have a soundcard waste a pcie slot nowadays.

[starshipeleven]

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 ?

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/

[M@GOid]

+1 to this.
I have the ASUS U7 (still an external USB card, just a bit bigger), and it's great.

Quite frankly it makes 0 sense to have a soundcard waste a pcie slot nowadays.

I was afraid of a bit of sound lag (after the S/PDIF experience), but none of the reviews I read mentioned it, so I bought one used and now I'm completely sold on the concept. And these Asus cards were also completely plug and play on Linux, contrary to some Creative cards.

[starshipeleven]

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.

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.