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http://steamcommunity.com/games/596420/announcements/detail/1647624403070736393
4 CUs at RX480 clocks is 640 GFLOPs.
How/why do devs need 640 GFLOPs for audio processing? That's the FP32 throughput equivalent of a 12-core Threadripper dedicated for audio alone.
This makes me question the compute efficiency of TrueAudio Next, at least compared to CPU implementations (which would make sense, since GPU audio convolution is 1 year-old and CPU audio convolution is.. 30 years-old?).
They also mention they're only using TrueAudio for reverb and not HRTF, because HRTF is very lean on CPU resources.
It seems it'll only be available as a top-end audio reverb choice for people with RX470 and up.
One odd fact is that it apparently supports Fiji cards (GCN3), but it doesn't support the full Tonga cards which have a compute throughput similar to the RX470.
I also feel there's a missed opportunity with the CU allocation here. Why is there no option to allocate a secondary GPU for TrueAudio Next?
People using a Raven Ridge + discrete graphics could be using the iGPU dedicated to TrueAudio Next, meaning up to 8 CUs for this ultra-high end audio reverb with no performance impact. Also, one could choose to buy e.g. an inexpensive (and #gasp# available) RX540 to use in their system with a GTX1080 Ti so they could get the high-end reverb too.
This is only the first release though, so I guess there's plenty of room to improve.
We have just released Steam Audio 2.0 beta 13, which brings support for AMD TrueAudio Next technology. TrueAudio Next lets developers accelerate certain spatial audio processing tasks by reserving a portion of the GPU. Combined with Steam Audio's ability to model a wide range of acoustic phenomena, this enables increased acoustic complexity and an increased sense of presence in games and VR applications.
AMD TrueAudio Next (TAN) is a software library that implements high-performance convolution – a filtering technique – for audio data on supported GPUs. TrueAudio Next also provides a feature called Resource Reservation, which allows developers to dedicate a portion of the GPU's computational resources to be spent on time-sensitive tasks such as audio processing. Here is a brief explanation of both of these high-level features of TAN.
(...)
TAN also provides a feature called resource reservation, which allows developers to reserve a portion of the GPU exclusively for audio processing.
(...)
With Resource Reservation, developers can reserve some small number, say 4, of the CUs for audio processing only. This dedicates 4 CUs for audio processing, while reducing the number of CUs available to the renderer by 4. Resource reservation does not allow more than 20 to 25% of the GPU CUs to be reserved.
4 CUs at RX480 clocks is 640 GFLOPs.
How/why do devs need 640 GFLOPs for audio processing? That's the FP32 throughput equivalent of a 12-core Threadripper dedicated for audio alone.
This makes me question the compute efficiency of TrueAudio Next, at least compared to CPU implementations (which would make sense, since GPU audio convolution is 1 year-old and CPU audio convolution is.. 30 years-old?).
They also mention they're only using TrueAudio for reverb and not HRTF, because HRTF is very lean on CPU resources.
It seems it'll only be available as a top-end audio reverb choice for people with RX470 and up.
One odd fact is that it apparently supports Fiji cards (GCN3), but it doesn't support the full Tonga cards which have a compute throughput similar to the RX470.
I also feel there's a missed opportunity with the CU allocation here. Why is there no option to allocate a secondary GPU for TrueAudio Next?
People using a Raven Ridge + discrete graphics could be using the iGPU dedicated to TrueAudio Next, meaning up to 8 CUs for this ultra-high end audio reverb with no performance impact. Also, one could choose to buy e.g. an inexpensive (and #gasp# available) RX540 to use in their system with a GTX1080 Ti so they could get the high-end reverb too.
This is only the first release though, so I guess there's plenty of room to improve.