Advanced Audio Technologies (HRTF, Dolby Atmos, etc) *echo*

Shape was never for Kinect, Shifty.

That's being a bit pedantic. There were large sections of the audio hardware that was reserved for Kinect usage. Most associate those blocks as being "Shape" or part of Shape.

Article (yes, it's VGLeaks but …) where we had discussed this in the forums: http://vgleaks.com/durango-sound-of-tomorrow/

The diagram at that link clearly demonstrates that SHAPE is one of 4 distinct audio processors inside the overall audio block/processor. The block that is responsible for processing Kinect audio is a generic programmable audio processor that they licensed from another company. It is not part of the "Kinect sensor".

So even though SHAPE is only 1 of 4 audio processors, most typically refer to all of the audio hardware as Shape.
 
Shape was never for Kinect, Shifty.
The aspect Davros is thinking of (DSPs) were.

https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-the-complete-xbox-one-interview
Digital Foundry: You talk about having 15 processors. Can you break that down?

Nick Baker: ...

The audio block was completely unique. That was designed by us in-house. It's based on four tensilica DSP cores and several programmable processing engines. We break it up as one core running control, two cores running a lot of vector code for speech and one for general purpose DSP. We couple with that sample rate conversion, filtering, mixing, equalisation, dynamic range compensation then also the XMA audio block. The goal was to run 512 simultaneous voices for game audio as well as being able to do speech pre-processing for Kinect.

Digital Foundry: There's concern that custom hardware may not be utilised in multi-platform games but I'm assuming that hardware-accelerated functions would be integrated into middlewares and would see wide utilisation.

Nick Baker: Yeah, Andrew can talk about the middleware point but some of these things are just reserved for the system to do things like Kinect processing. These are system services we provide. Part of that processing is dedicated to the Kinect.
SHAPE was never talked about as providing next-gen audio abilities (something we discussed here and wanted, like HRTF processing). One hopes it's been repurposed!

Edit: found the other discussion
https://forum.beyond3d.com/posts/1980836/

SHAPE is being used for HRTF in XB1X.
 
Last edited:
Steam Audio Radeon Rays support

https://steamcommunity.com/games/596420/announcements/detail/1681419156989664451

We have just released Steam Audio 2.0 beta 15, which brings support for AMD Radeon Rays technology. Radeon Rays is a high-performance, GPU-accelerated software library for ray tracing, and works on any modern AMD, NVIDIA, or other GPU. Steam Audio uses ray tracing when baking indirect sound propagation and reverberation; using Radeon Rays lets Steam Audio achieve performance gains of 50x-150x over the built-in ray tracer running with a single thread during baking. For example, reverb bakes that required an hour using the built-in ray tracer with a single thread should now take less than a minute using Radeon Rays on a Radeon RX Vega 64 GPU.

Radeon Rays support is optional in Steam Audio; Steam Audio continues to work on any PC with any CPU or GPU, as well as on ARM-based Android devices.

How is Radeon Rays useful to Steam Audio?
Steam Audio uses ray tracing for baking indirect sound propagation. Rays are traced from a probe position and bounced around the scene until they hit a source. The surfaces hit by the rays determine how much energy is absorbed, and how much reaches the probe from the source. These energies, along with the arrival times of each ray, are used to construct the impulse response from the source to the probe. An impulse response (IR) is an audio filter that represents the acoustics of the scene; rendering a sound with the IR creates the impression that the sound was emitted from within the scene.

The above approach is also used when baking reverb; in this case rays are traced from a probe position and bounced around the scene until they hit the probe again. The IR constructed this way models the listener-centric reverb at the probe position.

When baking, ray tracing is used to simulate indirect sound propagation for hundreds, or even thousands of probes for a typical scene. Radeon Rays lets developers use the compute capabilities of their GPU to significantly accelerate baking, resulting in measurable time savings during the design process.

The current release of Steam Audio does not support real-time simulation with Radeon Rays.

What is Radeon Rays?
Radeon Rays is a software library that provides GPU-accelerated algorithms for tracing coherent rays (direct light) and incoherent rays (global illumination, sound propagation). Radeon Rays is highly optimized for modern GPUs, and provides OpenCL and Vulkan backends. Steam Audio uses the OpenCL backend, which requires a GPU that supports OpenCL 1.2 or higher.

Radeon Rays is not restricted to AMD hardware; it works with any device that supports OpenCL 1.2 or higher, including NVIDIA and Intel GPUs.

What are the benefits of Radeon Rays?
When using Steam Audio to bake indirect sound propagation or reverb, Radeon Rays provides significant speedups and time savings for designers:

30b33a9ee35eedc3773ded1de7dc10ded49f0093.png

Figure: Speedup when baking reverb using Radeon Rays vs. Embree (single-threaded) vs. Steam Audio's built-in ray tracer (single-threaded), for two scenes: Sibenik cathedral (80k triangles) and a Hangar scene from the Unity Asset Store (140k triangles). Speedups are averaged over a range of simulation settings and probe grid densities, and plotted using a logarithmic scale. Speedups shown in the graph are relative to Steam Audio's built-in ray tracer. For example, on the Sibenik cathedral, Embree on a single core is 5.2x faster than the built-in ray tracer on a single core; Radeon Rays on an RX Vega 64 is 153.9x faster than the built-in ray tracer on a single core.

The above performance measurements were obtained on an Intel Core i7 5930K (Haswell E) CPU, along with an AMD Radeon RX Vega 64 GPU, running Windows 10 64-bit.

How do I enable Radeon Rays in Steam Audio?

System Requirements
Radeon Rays support in Steam Audio is requires a GPU that OpenCL 1.2 or higher. Tested GPUs include: AMD Radeon RX Vega 64, AMD Radeon R9 Nano, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti.

Radeon Rays support in Steam Audio is available on Windows (64-bit).
 
following your advice..., advice from a long time ago, I finally got a gamer headset today and tested the headset using Dolby Access (a Xbox/PC universal app that plays sound using Dolby Atmos). And I gotta say that...wow, the sound quality, even for some cheap stereo headset like mine is staggering!

Some time ago I paid 17€ to have Dolby Atmos on my PC and it is finally paying off. What surprises me the most about such a cheap headset is the sound quality of the bass sounds, I expected it to be a LOT worse and it really has punch.
 
So is it worth it to get the Atmos app on Windows ?
actually, it depends.... If you watch a lot of movies and they are compatible with Atmos, then of cours yes. Otherwise, on Windows you have Windows Sonic for headphones for free, it's different but it works just fine, and the Dolby Access app has some native demos of Atmos, and that's it.

However, Atmos sound is fuller on Windows, it surrounds you a lot more realistically, it has a soft chorus and reverb feel to it. If you don't have the app, the barber shop video that Shifty shared is the best way to experience the differences by ear, rather than the native Atmos demos.

If you use headphones a lot I'd say it's totally worth it! The difference is so pronounced... even in your regular youtube music video....
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Dolby Atmos has a demo on Windows, so it's free to try. Listening to this song is great example of how the sound improves using Atmos (compared to no Dolby or Windows Sonic). Love the song and Floor -my dream woman-.

The sound is so compressed and distorted at times....but Atmos makes it somewhat bearable -I am setting the bar low here, the minimum common denominator, but that's the point-

 
The sound is so compressed and distorted at times....but Atmos makes it somewhat bearable -I am setting the bar low here, the minimum common denominator, but that's the point-
I listened to this with Windows Sonic and to be blunt.. it sounds horrible..

I do hear some aplauses with convincing positional perception, but overall it's just not good.
Perhaps it's a lot better with Atmos? IDK.
 
What are you using to play movies with Atmos sound tracks on Windows?

Can you even rip Blu Ray discs and retain Atmos sound tracks? It would be a huge file wouldn't it? Even DTS MA will result in 20-30 GB rips.
 
What are you using to play movies with Atmos sound tracks on Windows?

Can you even rip Blu Ray discs and retain Atmos sound tracks? It would be a huge file wouldn't it? Even DTS MA will result in 20-30 GB rips.

You bitstream it to a receiver, usually. LAVfilters allow any DirectShow-based player to do this.

Yes you can.

Storage is pretty cheap and the object-based audio adds enough to make it worthwhile to accommodate the added file size.
 
The sound is so compressed and distorted at times....but Atmos makes it somewhat bearable -I am setting the bar low here, the minimum common denominator, but that's the point-
It's bootleg, it's not even Dolby Surround encoded or binaural recorded ... neither Atmos nor Windows Sonic should be doing anything to it, there is no way they're going to get any real positional cues from it. They might apply some DSP to it any way on the sly so people go think their stereo shit sounds "better", but they really shouldn't.
 
Last edited:
It's bootleg, it's not even Dolby Surround encoded or binaural recorded ... neither Atmos nor Windows Sonic should be doing anything to it, there is no way they're going to get any real positional cues from it. They might apply some DSP to it any way on the sly so people go think their stereo shit sounds "better", but they really shouldn't.
when playing stereo sound there aren't positional changes. I mean..., the Dolby Atmos sound has some soft chorus and reverb to it that enhances the sound and the stereo sound of your typical song, it envelopes the sound in a smooth way, and there is a very big difference. Windows Sonic is free, and Dolby Atmos is like 17€..., without content! --except for a few demos, but while native sound is scarce, it enhances any sound on your computer/Xbox.
 
Last edited:
It's advertised for object based sound positioning and mixing it to headphones with HRTF and to arbitrary speaker configurations. Declaring it better for throwing some effects on when playing youtube videos is silly. Microsoft correctly doesn't put those kinds of effects in Windows Sonic, that's what APOs are for (for instance the enhancement tab in the sound settings). Hell Microsoft has a room correction one, can ATMOS do microphone based room correction? Not even? What a complete load of tripe then, or maybe it's irrelevant ... one of the two.
 
Last edited:
It's advertised for object based sound positioning and mixing it to headphones with HRTF and to arbitrary speaker configurations. Declaring it better for throwing some effects on when playing youtube videos is silly. Microsoft correctly doesn't put those kinds of effects in Windows Sonic, that's what APOs are for (for instance the enhancement tab in the sound settings). Hell Microsoft has a room correction one, can ATMOS do microphone based room correction? Not even? What a complete load of tripe then, or maybe it's irrelevant ... one of the two.
like with many other things there are cases and cases and.., well, I don't totally agree with you and maybe if you find a way to give it a try -the Windows version has a timed demo- you can listen to it yourself. As for the effects, there is no mention of Room Correction and so on.

When you set a device to Dolby Atmos everything else gets defaulted and reset. I mean, if you have your device set at 192.000Hz and 24 bits, it defaults to 48.000Hz and 16 bits. So it kinda does its thing.

If you dare to change any parameter -going from 16 bits to 24 bits or switching to 44.100Hz or whatever-, you can, but then the sound changes overall and Dolby Atmos appears as set to off. You basically disable it.
 
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/dolby-access/9n0866fs04w8?activetab=pivot:overviewtab

This is the Dolby Access description in the store webpage:

Download this app to enable your free trial of Dolby Atmos for Headphones, or set up Dolby Atmos for home theater. Hear stunning detail, precision, and realism in your games and films, with sound that flows all around you — including from above and behind.

Play Shadow of the Tomb Raider in Dolby Atmos and feel the game come alive.

Experience the adrenaline of the arena at the Overwatch League Grand Finals. Captured in stunning Dolby Atmos, it's the next best thing to being there.
Games — experience amazing audio in any game, and specific Dolby Atmos audio mixes in:
● Shadow of the Tomb Raider
● Assassin’s Creed®: Origins
● Gears of War® 4
● Rise of the Tomb Raider™
● Super Lucky’s Tale™

● Plus many more to come Pinpoint teammates, enemies, and obstacles for a competitive edge and more intense game experience.


Movies and streaming — get closer to the action with immersive sound for your favorite TV shows and movies:
● Netflix™
● Hundreds of Blu-ray™ titles
● VUDU®
● Maxdome


This app walks you through the setup for two amazing ways to experience Dolby Atmos on your Xbox One, Xbox One X, or Windows 10 PC.

1. Start a free trial of Dolby Atmos for Headphones within the app, or buy it via a single in-app purchase. Dolby Atmos for Headphones works with any pair of stereo headphones.
2. Set up Dolby Atmos for home theater, which can be used for free with any Dolby Atmos compatible home theater system, TV, or sound bar.


Once you’ve set up Dolby Atmos, this app contains trailers that allow you to experience breakthrough sound all around and above you.
 
like with many other things there are cases and cases and.., well, I don't totally agree with you and maybe if you find a way to give it a try -the Windows version has a timed demo- you can listen to it yourself.
Object based audio won't do anything for stereo/5.1 mixes. If a sound utility is doing something to a stereo YouTube movie, it's something instead of object audio mixdown, which it shouldn't be doing. That's akin to having an amp advertised as being an EQ, but also adding reverb - you want the reverb to be a separate component or feature so you can control it. There are plenty of audio 3D space enhancers out there, so there's no real need for any to be integrated into Dolby Atmos.

From your linked description, Atmos doesn't claim to enhance stereo audio and doesn't list YouTube as a source for Atmos enabled audio.
 
Back
Top