Technical investigation into PS4 and XB1 audio solutions *spawn

A game is going to have to be in pretty good shape before it's stable enough to run for Q/A testing, i.e. it's already been through a ton of internal testing by engineers.

To a point yes, but very few games start from scratch these days so there is something playable very early, so QA is involved very early on. Often way too early IMO.

The games industry in general does not have a history of formally testing things, engineers obviously test their own code, but there is a lack of definition of correctness at a macro level.

Going off on a tangent for a minute. The WORST design documents define the behavior of a particular AI, but when implemented to the letter, often when interactions outside of the scope of that design are encountered things fail very badly. The best designers describe the intent of the design so an engineer can adjust the implementation to suit, rather than getting into a never ending cycle of chasing edge cases.

A lot of what an engineer does on a game is putz with edge cases that were not foreseen in the design, or initial implementation. Yes this happens in all large scale software to some extent, but IME it's a much bigger issue in games than in most software. It's a lot of the reason games are so difficult to estimate time on and why they slip.

There has been a push to move these types of things directly into the hands of designers, but all you are really doing there is adding a requirement of an engineering skill set onto the designer, and basically hiring some very junior engineer hopefully with some design sensibility.
 
...but there is a lack of definition of correctness at a macro level.


Ooo now this is a deep dark hole, one of my principle grudges against my alma mater is that one of our lecturers was so damn obsessed with 'correctness' it drove us to the edge of a murder plot. All we ever heard of was the joys of 'B' and the Paris Metro code base. Of course 5 minutes in the real world made clear to me that projects in the real world are a lot less concerned with 'correctness' than with 'correct-ish-ness'. Of course now I work in presales so now even my 'Hello World' code comes with bonus divide-by-zero errors
 
My work involves automotive ECU networking testspec and implementation. You can't even begin to imagine^^

"We found abnormal behavior"
"Is it customer relevant?"
"I can't tell you that"
"Then it's not abnormal"...

Ah well... I changed teams recently. I hope for the better (got a bit stale after nearly 2 years).
 
Last edited by a moderator:
My work involves automotive ECU networking testspec and implementation. You can't even begin to imagine^^

I can imagine... in automotive, there are just 3 big crack producers (+chinese)...

Security in automotive is ZERO, including and especially the typical speed limitation for trucks. ATM only last mercedes offers quite some security, that's why there are x00k bounties on their key system (let you guess who MIGHT have interest on such things...).
 
Welp... the entire Xbox core audio test team was let go during the MS layoffs last week :(. I'm glad I left when I did, or I would also be looking for a new job now. I don't know what this means for audio support and new uses. I believe the dev team is now expected to test their stuff themselves now, which will essentially halve the amount they can get done in the same time.
So sorry to hear that. The audio team made one of the most interesting chips in the entire Xbox One.

I wish those people find a new job soon. Yours were truly great timing. Still, I think SHAPE will be always used for future consoles, 'cos it is so fine it can pass the test of time.

I think MS placed tremendous value in audio to be honest, and realised the consumer doesn't care/have it as a priority.
Using that logic, people don't care about 3D either and HD...

This to me just means that the chip was great enough so they wanted to sack some people and keep the patents and design to use them in future devices.

Which doesn't mean that sound isn't as important, just that they got what they wanted and when layoffs kicked in they dismissed the entire team. :cry: Still... I am surprised it was the ENTIRE team. Some brilliant mind there should be kept in the team or moved to another division.

Additionally, I wonder how many transistors SHAPE uses, but it should be very scalable these days.

Anyway, thanks to bkilian :smile2: and the rest of the people who made it possible. The Xbox One would be so very mediocre without it...., hampering either the CPU or the GPU when it is a console that needs them the most.
 
As with any new hardware, there are always funky complexities and quirks to work around. Luckily in this particular situation, it hasn’t affected us. As I mentioned above, having the extra audio processor on the Xbox One has had both benefits and detriments for us, but we’ve worked through them.
“Last generation, the situation was reversed, and we had to work hard through the complexity of the PS3. Comparatively, this generation has been much easier to work with. From our perspective on the audio side, the two systems are pretty much the same, though we get the secondary output on PS4 (playing sounds through the controller, like in Resogun), which is a pretty neat feature.”

Read more at http://gamingbolt.com/xbox-one-esra...x-similar-from-audio-side#TDrZpFm905Qdk7vd.99

http://gamingbolt.com/xbox-one-esra...e-development-ps4xbox-similar-from-audio-side
 
As with any new hardware, there are always funky complexities and quirks to work around. Luckily in this particular situation, it hasn’t affected us. As I mentioned above, having the extra audio processor on the Xbox One has had both benefits and detriments for us, but we’ve worked through them.

“Last generation, the situation was reversed, and we had to work hard through the complexity of the PS3. Comparatively, this generation has been much easier to work with. From our perspective on the audio side, the two systems are pretty much the same, though we get the secondary output on PS4 (playing sounds through the controller, like in Resogun), which is a pretty neat feature.”


http://gamingbolt.com/xbox-one-esra...e-development-ps4xbox-similar-from-audio-side


I mentioned this quite a few times in previous threads... but yes, the mini speaker built in the PS4 controller is quite unique. IMHO, it’s more innovative in terms of immersion, than the wonky touchpad. Even with a nice 7.1 surround sound setup, just hearing a voice or eerie environmental effect through the DS4 speaker, brings a nice added depth towards sound immersion.

Sometimes it’s the little things that can make you smile… :smile:
 
I mentioned this quite a few times in previous threads... but yes, the mini speaker built in the PS4 controller is quite unique.

I agree. It sounds gimmicky, but based on the games I've played, it's being used really well. Voice logs and voice overs coming through the speaker are great. I'm surprised at the quality of the audio.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Yes the mini speaker in the wii controllers was also quite unique but sadly it was mostly used a gimick . I hope they find better uses for the ps4 one.

I'd be interested to hear what the detriments to a dedicated audio chip would be ? With ubisoft saying these cpu's are weak i would think being able to off load sound to a dedicated hardware would be a god send .
 
I'd be interested to hear what the detriments to a dedicated audio chip would be ? With ubisoft saying these cpu's are weak i would think being able to off load sound to a dedicated hardware would be a god send .
Coming from an audio middleware company, it may be implementation and execution of their audio pipeline that's an issue for them. He probably has little interest in the CPU overhead difference because it doesn't impact them directly.
 
The mix of 'AudioKinetic' and 'AudioKinectic' is pretty painful! Poor company.
Yes, that caught my attention too, that's a kinetic term mix-up. It's not worse than a Peter Molyneux or Molineux mix tho. :D The molybdenum is quite an odd developer --I don't miss that developer on consoles..
 
A neat interview which mentions some of the innards of the hardware of current gen consoles.
It doesn't really

and it doesn't really get anyone enthusiastic about shape
he PS4 does not have an on board audio processor but the Xbox One has one. Does this impose any kind of limitations when developing the tool for the PS4 version?
Answer : Not Really
 
Last edited:
It doesn't really

and it doesn't really get anyone enthusiastic about shape

Answer : Not Really
That sounds like a tantrum, more than anything else. He says nothing of the sort. The interviewee just mentions that the hardware dedicated processor for audio has its advantages and disadvantages, which we don't know of as of yet --well, stereo uncompressed, 5.1 uncompressed, and 7.1 uncompressed sound might be some of them, and those options are available for everyone to use in the settings menu of the console. So please calm down with those assumptions.
 
Its a direct quote It wasnt my interpretation
Ok fair. It's just not about which system produces better audio -using the GPU for audio on the PS4 might yield some impressive results, or maybe it could become a smoke curtain if not used- but it could explain why the Xbox One can free up to 80% of a CPU core to use for games and not for the system. Audio can use a lot of processing power, and the PS4 is known for having a very efficient OS, which is very light on resources usage, so having a second CPU core for system resources primarily used for audio could explain why Sony aren't freeing up the second CPU core for now.

Plus, they admit to taking advantage of the audio chip. And talk about VR systems -maybe Project Morpheus-

We do exploit some of the additional audio hardware on the Xbox One, and we support the special codecs on each platform (ATRAC-9 on PS4, XMA on Xbox One). We’ve also been doing some work for 3D surround audio (and by that I mean not just 5.1/7.1 mixes, but also height channel and headphone virtualization), which will have benefits for VR systems.
 
but it could explain why the Xbox One can free up to 80% of a CPU core to use for games
It does. The reason shape exists ultimately is not to create more realistic in game audio but to save disk space without using cpu resources.
Shape has a lot of power but most of it is hardwired to 1 specific task, decompressing audio, Don't get me wrong this is a good thing especially now we are in the era of the 50gb game, (what hdd do consoles ship with now is it 500gb? As I have scientifically proved 500gb is not enough for games, so anything that helps in that area is a godsend) but from the viewpoint of someone hoping that power would be dedicated to correctly modelling the in game environment its hugely disappointing.
 
Last edited:
Audio can use a lot of processing power, and the PS4 is known for having a very efficient OS, which is very light on resources usage, so having a second CPU core for system resources primarily used for audio ...

As far as I understood, Sony has something similar to AMD TrueAudio in PS4. Why they'd need a processor reserved for audio?
 
Back
Top