Technical investigation into PS4 and XB1 audio solutions *spawn

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.

 

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.

 

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

 

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/

 

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

 

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

 

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

Similar to audiokinetic Mike Drummelsmith's comments:

Spoiler

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?

 

Yes to both.

 

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.

 

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)

 

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,

 

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).

 

Wrong thread for that discussion.

 

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

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?

 

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