It is somewhat interesting, however, that AMD specifically included an Audio DSP block to support audio in their GPUs rather than using compute for anything audio related in games. And from what Dave said, it was mainly due to synchronization issues rather than contention for GPU compute resources.
Meaning that it's likely far more complicated than one would assume to do properly synchronized game audio through GPU compute than otherwise (CPU for example). With audio manipulation programs that isn't gong to be an issue as there is nothing you have to synchronize it with. With video players, again, it isn't an issue as you can delay your video stream in order to synchronize with the audio. For games, you can't delay each frame of the game to synchronize with the audio.
As well, while much time and money has been invested to do audio manipulation through CUDA for Nvidia hardware, that doesn't apply to game audio. And it isn't as if Nvidia or developers are afraid to use GPU compute for non-graphics rendering purposes. Nvidia have been pushing hard for GPU compute to be used in games whenever possible, so them avoiding it for game audio is fairly conspicuous.
What isn't known, of course, is whether Sony have included any modifications to the the GPU block with an eye towards solving that problem.
Regards,
SB
Geez audio everywhere right now
There are a lot of problems to be solved and audio is one of them. Of course solving other problems leaves more resources for audio issues should there be any. I don't know the specifics of the synchronizations issues that Dave is mentioning but I have a hunch they have to do with access to the CPU. This would be an issue for all GPU cards, including Nvidia and their compute solutions, since they all hang out on the "wrong side of the tracks" on the PCIe bus :smile: This would be less of an issue for the consoles and maybe even less so for the PS4 ( assuming Sony is allowing a fair amount of fine grained control over caches and the like ). Meaning while HSA has benefits for GPU cards if they take advantage of it, there is more CPU/GPU collaboration possible with APUs as things now stand.
So while finding a GPGPU audio solution during the game might have fewer eyeballs on the problem than more generalized solutions to other gaming issues I would find it puzzling to think that audio will be the downfall of the PS4 performance wise. It's not like they wouldn't be aware of the issue which would bring us back to the point you make at the end. We just don't know
If there is enough weeping from the SDF with audio like with the memory allocation kerfuffle maybe Sony will let a few more beans spill
"Fine Grained Control" -> PS4 as "Balance (tm) -> XB1