"The PS3 is so fast - tens of GigaFLOPs on each of seven CPUs available to us - that high-order Ambisonics suits it very well. Most of the optimisation effort went into the trigonometry needed to go from game-style orthogonal vectors and matrices to the azimuth and elevation model now standard for Ambisonics. After that, the encoder and decoder are very fast, especially as they parallelise well, without pipeline bottlenecks like division and tight operand dependencies.
Overall Ambisonics complements other aspects of nextGen PS3 game audio, like good quality sample-rate-conversion - rather than the noisy LERPs still sadly common on PCs - plus modern psychoacoustically-modelled decompression, and phase-coherent 512 band filtering on each voice. There’s so much CPU power on PS3 that all this, and multiple reverbs, can run on a single SPU (Synergistic Processing Element, an eighth of the PS3’s Cell processor array) with time to spare.
There are six independent reverb units running in the PS3 version, versus two stereo ones on Xbox360. These are not just for reflections in tunnels or when you get close to trackside objects - they works beautifully for reflections from other vehicles too, and give exciting effects when the car goes out of control - the sort of emergent behaviour you look forward to getting when you combine several advanced systems in one game!"
"The HDMI 7.1 on PS3 already allows us to have six speakers in a regular hexagon, ideal for Ambisonics, without breaking the Blumlein stereo panning rules or Dolby cinema guidelines (so the front centre and sub are available for audio conceptually outside the soundfield, like co-driver calls, checkpoint notifications and front-end sounds)."
"Your best bet for the time being is to find a well-configured PS3 with HDMI in 7.1 on matched speakers, and hear the game respond to you directly. It’s a lot of fun, especially if you’re a good listener."
