spiroyster wrote:

Another issue with the realism of sound and its impracticality with gaming is perhaps the fact that sound is a lot slower than light...

I was surprised when playing Arma 2 and there is a delay in the sound of artillery explosions depending on the distance. I don't know wheter other games ever simulated this, as I stick to old games generally.

Azarien wrote:

spiroyster wrote:

in an open space, there can be a noticable lag in the observer hearing the sound after seeing an explosion... in water sound travels ~4 times faster than in air... all these little naunces, I can't see being advatageous when using physical based sound modelling. In fact it could be argued that it is a hinderance (esepcially when reaction times are so important in many games)?

One could blame the reality, but it'd be better to teach people that this is how sound works.

True... I guess we do this with visiuals too... afterall wtf is 'Ambience'? oh... becasue we don't have GI and otherwise there would be sections of games/levels that no one can see anything.... perhaps this is where physically based sound comes in o.0

gerwin wrote:

spiroyster wrote:

Another issue with the realism of sound and its impracticality with gaming is perhaps the fact that sound is a lot slower than light...

I was surprised when playing Arma 2 and there is a delay in the sound of artillery explosions depending on the distance. I don't know wheter other games ever simulated this, as I stick to old games generally.

Maybe there is merit in it then.... so If a nuke goes off, user just experiences a flash and then dies 😀.... no need to model sound in that case... woohoo first optimisation for physically based sound during thermal nuclear war... joshua will be pleased.

I think Half Life 2 and Crysis model the speed of sound / propagation. Must be others. Maybe anything using those engines?

Yeah... the "sound card industry" as it exists today is basically divided between pro-audio equipment, would-be-Hi-Fi and the rest.

There was a brief period in the late 90's and early 2000's when a good sound card was the amalgamation of a few key characteristics:

* High-quality analog audio output
* Hardware mixing
* Multi-channel support
* 3D audio processing
* SoundFonts or other sample-based high-quality MIDI implementation
* Backwards compatibility with legacy audio applications

Because most of us had analog speakers or headphones, the digital-to-analog sound quality of your card really mattered back then. Not so much today, since we've basically moved the DACs to our audio gear (speakers and headphones). Even the shoddiest motherboard audio card will give you perfect quality thru the digital output.

Multi-channel and 3D audio were all the rage with Aureal taking a clear lead in positioning and realism of sound. What made Aureal a big deal was that they did for sound what 3Dfx did to 3D-rendering: they made it possible by taking the load off the main CPU. Though I generally dislike Creative, I have to state that EAX was also a good idea and the effects when executed on SoundBlaster Live! did sound fairly impressive, even if the card was inferior to competition in other ways. Hardware EAX could have complemented A3D in a nice way, had the two met.

Backwards compatibility usually meant SoundBlaster emulation for legacy games. Other than the FM-synth/AdLib, for the most part the emulation worked on almost all cards quite flawlessly and today is essentially a moot point.

With the death of Aureal the only thing that would make a difference today, namely hardware driven audio engines ceased development and coupled with the fact that analog-to-digital conversion has moved to our amps/speakers/headphones, there really isn't a market for discreet sound cards any more for people other than audio professionals (need those extra jacks and low-latency) or nerds with analog equipment. For the average joe, any card on the market is now good enough. Even the lowliest built-in audio chips do their jobs just fine, given that any special audio effects are now essentially done in software and run on the main-CPU once again.

Probably already mentioned, but for anyone seriously interested in audio, a "sound card" doesn't work - powered studio speakers typically have balanced 1/4 inch jacks and XLR connections, you simply cannot fit that option on a PCI card. Since supporting that would require a breakout box anyway, people just end up using USB audio interfaces instead. I use an external USB mixing desk connected to KRK Rokit 5 monitors.

TAN update was released on github a hour ago

ReleaseNotes.txt wrote:

TrueAudio Next 1.2 release notes New features in this release: […]
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TrueAudio Next 1.2 release notes
New features in this release:

• GPU accelerated Mixer
• 10 Band EQ filter and sample
• Infinite Impulse Response (IIR) filter
• Time domain convolution and Doppler sample
• GPU utility function to list TAN enabled devices and their capabilities
• TAN is now integrated in Steam Audio
https://gpuopen.com/trueaudio-next-now-integr … ed-steam-audio/

According to docs, Wwise plugins should also be in the works.

While porting A3D Rooms to Unity and Steam Audio I noticed that the CPU usage quickly shot up the more sources I added, especially with high quality HRTF and reflections, so non-CPU acceleration would certainly help.

leonardo wrote:

Not so much today, since we've basically moved the DACs to our audio gear (speakers and headphones).

Oh, we did? I haven't noticed that. I think most people's speakers and headphones are still analog.

Bluetooth speakers and headphones seem to be quite popular.