Technical investigation into PS4 and XB1 audio solutions *spawn

[Jay]

Had a look on umbra's web site
Found this quote

Again no mention of shape.
Betanumerical's info seems to be spot on from what i can gather

We don't know how much it's used in exclusive titles.
From what I remember (and may have changed by now), one of the two main audio middleware only used the mp3 decoding, same as ps4. They didn't sound like they had much interest in making use of any 'custom/unique' hardware, think they said they may look into gpgpu.
What MS should be doing is either writing some custom plugins/updating ones available, or get the first parties that use them to feed them back to the middleware etc.

As for Umbra, from what I remember about the QB presentation, they didn't go into what they did or didn't use in SHAPE, umbra isn't the audio software, they added some audio info to the data so it could be used for visibility AND audio propagation.
It would've been nice to have a deep dive into how SHAPE is used, that pretty much goes for any title at this point , especially exclusives.

 

[helvetica bold]

I'm really interested in Dolby Atmos for games. Dice's Battlefront is the first announced Atmos game but its exclusive for PC (so far).
Im sure it will sound brilliant considering its from DICE. So what's perventing the PS4 and Xbox One from running
games in Atmos? I wouldn't think thats the next step in gaming audio.

 

[Arwin]

SDK support on consoles? It would normally need to be selectable in the console global settings.

 

[Cyan]

Mad Max's audio lets you recognise your car by sound and even models the echoes.

http://www.gamesradar.com/mad-maxs-audio-lets-you-recognise-you-car-sound-and-even-models-echos/

 

[Davros]

the Swedish studio has taken the time to record countless engine configurations in mountainous terrain."We recorded outside, measuring mountain ranges to see how you get the feeling of sounds bouncing, based on how empty the world is and what can it bounce to"

Makes it sound like they are not acoustically modelling engines or echoes and the fact its a multiplatform game makes me doubt shape is doing any processing

 

[Shifty Geezer]

"We recorded outside, measuring mountain ranges to see how you get the feeling of sounds bouncing, based on how empty the world is and what can it bounce to," adds Lindberg. "We have a simulation of that also in the game. On everything surrounding the player that has some kind of elevation we have a system to make sure that audio bounces back to the player from that to get the right feeling."

Seems like engine sounds are recorded, reverb is computed. As you'd expect.

 

[Globalisateur]

That interview from FMOD studio has probably being posted earlier, but still is the most interesting info we have on dedicated hardware audio on PS4 and XB1:

http://gamingbolt.com/fmod-studio-i...e-sound-for-the-current-generation-and-beyond

FMOD Studio has added native support for hardware accelerated decompression of XMA data on Xbox One and ATRAC9 and resampling support on PlayStation 4

FMOD Studio does all of its mixing and signal processing on the CPU, which is a departure from the previous FMOD Ex engine. It allows us total flexibility and control over the signal, and avoids the limitations of dedicated hardware such as lack of cross-platform support

Similar to audiokinetic Mike Drummelsmith's comments:

Spoiler

As soon as you hand off something to a dedicated processor and say ‘do something with this’, you’re pretty much bound to whatever that processor does!

FMOD Studio currently uses the audio processor on the Xbox One for two things: XMA decoding and sample rate conversion. This is one of the most expensive parts of the process when processing audio in real-time

On PlayStation 4 there is hardware to allow decoding of ATRAC compressed audio, so it is very similar to the Xbox One in regards to offloading decoding from the CPU.

So in summary they use hardware audio for:

XB1- XMA decoding and sample data rate conversion
PS4 - Decoding of ATRAC compressed audio and resampling support

I assume XMA decoding is the equivalent of ATRAC decoding.
Is sample data rate conversion the equivalent of resampling support?

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Yes to both.

 

[Davros]

Necro'd because shifty linked here from the ps4 vr thread
Now that the xbox1 has been out for over 2 years has any xbox 1 game demonstrated any of the wonderful effects and realistic audio that some people have claimed shape is capable of ?

 

[Cyan]

Necro'd because shifty linked here from the ps4 vr thread
Now that the xbox1 has been out for over 2 years has any xbox 1 game demonstrated any of the wonderful effects and realistic audio that some people have claimed shape is capable of ?

Shape seems to have a lot of potential and might save some precious cycles to the CPU but it all comes down to the fact that in order to differentiate these days you need to take full advantage of an architecture or have a 100% quality advantage.

It's curious that you bring this today. I was thinking about where bkilian is, I miss him in the forum, :/ and after having those thoughts, today I was reading some articles about MIDI and the SNES and so on, and found this:

http://www.gamedev.net/topic/631149-what-does-it-take-to-create-snes-style-sound-effects/

http://gamasutra.com/blogs/BrianSch...ning_the_Boot_Sound_for_the_Original_Xbox.php

Could this guy be bkilian? He designed music for the SNES (and explains some secrets about it), was at Microsoft and also designed the boot sound of the original Xbox using very little memory.

 

[pMax]

Could this guy be bkilian?

if I remember properly, it took me like 20 minutes or so to find who bkilian was - just use google and linkedin if you are so curious
tip - he had long hair in the picture, and a germanish (or north europe) name, i dont remember exactly.

(dont ask me)

 

[Deleted member 13524]

From today's Ask-Me-Anything by AMD_Robert:

Question:
What happened with TrueAudio? This was the most exciting feature of the Radeon GPUs, but there isn't any new game that support it.

Answer:
TrueAudio still finds regular use in the console space. However, on the desktop PC side there seems to be generally less interest in complicated soundscapes for PC gaming. Going forward, we're interested in exploring TrueAudio's rich positional capabilities to augment VR experiences--I think this is probably a better use for the technology.

Is this evidence that the PS4 uses the whole TrueAudio block?

 

[pjbliverpool]

From today's Ask-Me-Anything by AMD_Robert:

Is this evidence that the PS4 uses the whole TrueAudio block?

Or maybe it just had something to do with them still not releasing TrueAudio across their whole range at least 2 years after it was originally announced,

 

[Deleted member 13524]

Or maybe it just had something to do with them still not releasing TrueAudio across their whole range at least 2 years after it was originally announced,

This refers to what? Lack of adoption in the PC space?

 

[pjbliverpool]

This refers to what? Lack of adoption in the PC space?

Referencing his comment that there's less interest in complicated soundscapes in PC gaming. I'd say the opposite is true, but AMD made very little effort get the hardware out there. (See 7870, 270x, 370).

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Wrong thread for that discussion.

 

[Deleted member 13524]

I made some follow-up questions, to which he answered:

- Does the PS4 have the exact same audio DSP block as TrueAudio in discrete GPUs?
- No.

- When is it used? Does the console use it automatically every time a compatible middleware for audio is used in development? E.g. every time we see "Wwise" and/or FMOD in a PS4 game can we assume TrueAudio is being used?
- Same dependencies as PC: when the developer choose the TrueAudio-enabled versions of any Wwise/FMOD plugin.

- If so, why isn't this simply ported to PC games in multi-platform titles?
- Lots of things don't carry over from PC to console, and vice versa. I am not privy to the details as of why.

So it's not the exact same DSP block, but he keeps calling it "TrueAudio" when referring to the consoles' hardware audio acceleration.
Also, it just seems to be a matter of choosing to enable the TrueAudio plugin.


So TrueAudio isn't dead, it's being used on consoles. I would love to know some numbers on how many games are using it though.
Is there any reason why a developer would choose a software solution instead, besides cost?

 

[Allandor]

Trueaudio is not only hardware, it is also software. There should be no need to have specific hardware to use trueaudio technology. The cpu/gpu can make those calculations, too