Yep this is great news for compatibility in the PC space. I wonder how difficult it would be for NV to implement a compatible solution in it's GPU's given that TrueAudio to my understanding uses standard 3rd party DSP's topped bya software layer which interfaces with standard 3rd party audio middleware? Hopefully not too difficult!
Good point. It'll be great if TrueAudio supporting games have a CPU fallback option for those system that don't have the hardware.
Well, technically, yes, that might even make the most sense. PR-wise, that wouldn't be a very good choice for NVIDIA.
As far as I'm aware the dedicated hardware isn't doing anything particularly difficult, just common arithmetic operations, so it ought to be possible. There would be a cost in graphics performance, naturally, but I think it would work. Of course, NVIDIA might be very reluctant to support AMD's technology, just as AMD was—and still is—unwilling to support PhysX or CUDA.
The other consideration is latency and synchronization concerns. Those seem to have been reasons for why AMD didn't use its own shaders. Unless there's something significantly different in the architecture, emulation via shaders might have the same problem for Nvidia.
I was think the same thing, without saying the port is maybe not that easy ( i mean this is 2 different drivers then, one for dedicated audio processors and one software for CPU or "shader"... You completely lost the interest of it and this is surely more easy to just use the "standard audio layer of the game " ( who will be run by the cpu )
I'm not sure the sharing relationship would be matched between the 2 companies though. Has Nvidia ever been publically willing to provide the ability for AMD to support CUDA/PhysX? Was there even a public offer for licensing?
Sort of: http://gizmodo.com/5023150/nvidia-helping-modders-port-physx-engine-to-ati-radeon Well, apparently there may not be any need for a license, but I think it would have been good for NVIDIA to turn PhysX into something of a de facto standard.
You know how many years ago ibm contracted ms for an o/s and ms reserved the right to sell it to other companies, I wonder if tensilica have done a similar deal with truaudio
I haz a question Amd's new apu's have truaudio, If I had one but a non trueaudio gpu would I only get truaudio support if the rendering was done on the apu ?
Well, I actually think his question about A3D vs. Creative didn't deserve an answer, as loaded as it was. There's nothing about TA that remotely reminds me of either Creative or A3D--I mean, aside from the fact that they all generally deal with "audio." About ISV proprietary tech, nVidia's PhysX is supported fairly widely even though it has no AMD analog. So, why wouldn't TA work at the very least equally as well? Here's the thing for me: which tech seems more substantial and which would I rather have, since I have to make a choice? TA gets the nod, obviously. Seems much more interesting than something silly like nVidia PhysX support. The other thing is that it's well-known how long and hard and fruitlessly various companies have worked on and tried to sell so-called "5.1 headphone sets". Every single review I've read about such phones ends up describing very disappointing products that always miss the "5.1" definition by a country mile. TA is a real technology that for real can do it--better actually, as in 360-degrees of sound coverage, and through ordinary stereo phones, no less! If you don't think that's fantastic you need to listen to the bottom you-tube audio file linked below (if you don't listen to both), preferably through ordinary stereo phones. It blew me away. There's absolutely no gimmick here. I think that's very exciting...!
Enable PhysX on the cpu and it becomes immediately obvious why you don't want to turn it on without a supporting nVidia gpu installed (I mean, besides the obvious fact that all PhysX does is add phoney, extraneous debris to explosions, things cracking and breaking, etc. The "patched-on" graphics effect of PhysX is glaringly obvious, imo.) If AMD released the software version for the cpu to process, the same thing would happen with True Audio (what it does for ordinary stereo phones is incredible!) Since the dedicated hardware is there on the gpu and TA uses your installed sound device for output, this doesn't seem like a difficult decision for game developers. I think it will all boil down as it always does to the developer tools AMD releases for TA support (I keep wanting to write: T&A support!) If they are robust and fairly simple to use then we'll see TA support popping up everywhere. If the tools are cumbersome and burdensome, then probably not...
I do think its fantastic thats why Ive had that ability for years. Ive been a big supporter of enviromental audio moddeling and hrtf ever since a3d 1.0 and eax 1.0 were released allthough few other people seem to care about it (the onboard audio is good enough brigade)
Of course onboard audio is fine if you use digital output. And have support for DDL or DTS realtime encoding...
I've almost always ignored the stuff, but that's because Creative tried so early to kill or corner the market. I once bought a (used, outdated) sound card with some "3D" effects, I don't remember what card it was. It was nice but slowed down the game and it was an *ISA* board. I tried to put a SIMM on it but that dreadful slanted slot broke off so I couldn't check if it allowed to play games at a normal framerate with an additional 4MB memory. BTW I hated nvidia at the time, for all their overt cheating during the Geforce FX debate but after that they didn't do much wrong.. I still hate Creative, as much as e.g. Epson and Lexmark