Technical investigation into PS4 and XB1 audio solutions *spawn

[pMax]

If it's in hardware, it should be present in every game, no? Otherwise the hardware is sat there doing nothing.

even if having the hardware, it would not mean it has software and firmware implemented for such functions..

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Although a possibility, it seems off to me that it's in there and doing nothing. AMD released TrueAudio 8 months ago and have drivers for it. I find it hard to believe that, 6 months after release, Sony would have TrueAudio binaural hardware in their box, which they've never talked about, which doesn't presently do anything and isn't used in any games. Why wouldn't Sony have working drivers alongside the PC ones developed in cahoots with AMD when they agreed to include TrueAudio?

 

[Globalisateur]

There was no need to go to VGleaks for reading PS4 audio block specifications.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-face-to-face-with-mark-cerny

The problem were people that didn't accept this informations as they were.

13 July 2013, Mark Cerny: There's dedicated audio hardware. The principal thing that it does is that it compresses and decompresses audio streams, various formats...

Notice how carefully does Mark Cerny talk about the PS4 audio hardware: "dedicated audio hardware". He never talks about any real DSP.

I still think that one core of the CPU is permanently "dedicated" to the audio compression and decompression tasks, leaving one core for the OS and the 6 remaining cores for the games.

 

[Relab]

Why even wait for Sony, when you can implement binaural algorithms in x86 - takes around 7.5% of a single jaguar core at 44.1KHz (32 sample buffers)? It takes even less on high-end haswell 4770 (below 0.8% of a single core). That's a semi optimised SIMD implemtation - yet not many PC games have the feature.

 

[Davros]

as in PS4 doesn't have the DSPs that XB1 has that could do fancy audio effects .

Can the xb1 do fancy audio effects? ive only heard it has reverb ?
A while ago i asked if any xb1 games exhibited any kind of environmental audio modeling and was told no.

I just tried to look up in google for a list of games that use Astoundsound 3D

Thief ?

 

[pjbliverpool]

Why even wait for Sony, when you can implement binaural algorithms in x86 - takes around 7.5% of a single jaguar core at 44.1KHz (32 sample buffers)? It takes even less on high-end haswell 4770 (below 0.8% of a single core). That's a semi optimised SIMD implemtation - yet not many PC games have the feature.

Presumably that uses the dual MADD capability of AVX2 to achieve the (almost) 10x performance increase per core?

 

[Relab]

The Jaguar implementation is a SSE 4.1 implementation and the Haswell is an AVX2 without FMA. In both cases you could probably shave off 30% with heavy optimization.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Can the xb1 do fancy audio effects?

If the DSP weren't being used for voice recognition, yes.

 

[Davros]

what effects ?

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Any effect a fully programmable audio DSP can do.

 

[Davros]

That makes it sound like ms have said to devs "heres the dsp, heres a programming guide, we havnt created any effects for you, and if you want an effect your going to have to code it yourselves"

 

[Shifty Geezer]

At the moment the DSPs are used by Kinect and the devs have no access to them. If these are made available to devs, they'll have DSP audio in XB1. PS4 won't have similar DSP audio because it doesn't have a similar programmable audio DSP (at least there's zero evidence for it so far), although PS4 does have a DSP which can decompress and mix audio. It just can't do any fancy audio stuff (whether that's HRTF functions or just bog-standard reverb).

 

[Deleted member 13524]

Notice how carefully does Mark Cerny talk about the PS4 audio hardware: "dedicated audio hardware". He never talks about any real DSP.

I still think that one core of the CPU is permanently "dedicated" to the audio compression and decompression tasks, leaving one core for the OS and the 6 remaining cores for the games.

There's been an official presentation from Sony claiming that there's an Audio DSP based around the TrueAudio that is present in GCN1.1 GPUs:

Continuing our coverage of AMD’s APU13 conference, one of this morning’s keynotes has been from Sony’s VP of Research & Development in North America, Dominic Mallinson. Most of Dominic’s presentation was a recap of the PS4 thus far – including some detail in why Sony went with an AMD APU for the console – but Dominic did throw in one more piece of information on the PS4’s specifications that we haven’t heard before. Specifically, the PS4’s audio DSP is based on AMD’s TrueAudio technology.

An entire Jaguar core just for audio compression and decompression would be a huge overkill.

Thief ?

Hum.. Thief uses the TrueAudio hardware acceleration but that doesn't forcefully mean it uses astoundsound 3D.. It probably does, though.

That makes it sound like ms have said to devs "heres the dsp, heres a programming guide, we havnt created any effects for you, and if you want an effect your going to have to code it yourselves"

Availability of Astoundsound 3D has been made available for the PC, PS4 and XBone since October last year, at least through Wwise:

Los Angeles, CA – October 22nd, 2013 - GenAudio is proud to announce the availability of its premier AstoundSound® 3D audio plugin suite for the latest Audiokinetic Wwise 2013.2 release. The plug-in suite is now available for Windows®, Xbox One, and PlayStation®4.

I wouldn't know if the XBone has a TrueAudio-esque DSP, but it probably does and it's probably being used.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

I wouldn't know if the XBone has a TrueAudio-esque DSP...

TrueAudio uses Tensilica cores. PS4's audio was 'Tensilica' as are the DSPs in XB1's audio processor. That's as much as any of us know.

 

[Deleted member 13524]

TrueAudio uses Tensilica cores. PS4's audio was 'Tensilica' as are the DSPs in XB1's audio processor. That's as much as any of us know.

Probably they both have and they both do the same. The only difference is that Sony officials did state the name "TrueAudio" as an indicator of what to expect of the audio subsystem's capabilities. I never saw a statement like that from microsoft.

 

[Cyan]

Probably they both have and they both do the same. The only difference is that Sony officials did state the name "TrueAudio" as an indicator of what to expect of the audio subsystem's capabilities. I never saw a statement like that from microsoft.

On the PS4 they have some spare power, GPU side, and my guess is that the DSP is like your typical DSP, and they will use a CUDA like solution for audio -there are audio effects that only work with CUDA on the PC, for instance (tried one yesterday)- , using some specialised libraries made by AMD.

I am very curious about what will happen this generation, audio wise.

 

[Davros]

I wouldn't know if the XBone has a TrueAudio-esque DSP, but it probably does and it's probably being used.

not necessarily.

GenAudio created AstoundSound as a software solution. No special equipment is required,

 

[taisui]

not necessarily.

You know or you are just speculating?
It seems odd to remove something that's just standard to that line of GPU chips.

 

[Davros]

I know that astoundsound does not need special hardware, whether it does use dsp's on the consoles I dont know.

ps: just found this

 

[Deleted member 13524]

On the PS4 they have some spare power, GPU side, and my guess is that the DSP is like your typical DSP, and they will use a CUDA like solution for audio -there are audio effects that only work with CUDA on the PC, for instance (tried one yesterday)- , using some specialised libraries made by AMD.

I am very curious about what will happen this generation, audio wise.

It's not a "typical DSP", Sony stated it's derivative of AMD's TrueAudio. It's probably the very same block of hardware that we have in Bonaire, Hawaii and Kaveri with the only difference being some very specific stuff.