Been meaning to post this but it seems that GND-Tech was down for a few days. Glad to see it's back up.
Not all of this is accurate and up to date, but it's a good article a few years old that shows how advanced audio was missed even years back.
Been meaning to post this but it seems that GND-Tech was down for a few days. Glad to see it's back up.
Good article on the discussion of old gaming tech that's been mostly left behind, I have an interest in pretty much all of this and it's sad most of the advanced stuff is long gone(physics, AI, native lighting/anti aliasing, and so on) but obviously this sub is specifically about audio so that's the focus here.
Extremely useful GitHub repo pages for MANY 3d audio projects.
Will make related posts in the future on some of these projects.
Unfortunately it seems that they mostly did nothing with the technology and let it die off.
Which is interesting as in theory it is a superior method vs AMD TrueAudio Next which utilizes RAY tracing rather than path tracing, and performs acceleration on the standard GPU cores(instead of the dedicated DSP SIP block that the first version of TrueAudio used) which of course is less efficient than RT cores.
-That being said, TrueAudio achieved much greater success and adoption in many games as well as integration into SteamAudio.
This is not to mention other big name alternatives, perhaps most interestingly to this comparison being Microsoft Project Acoustics/Triton, which uses Wave Tracing to perform most likely the most accurate emulation of real life sound waves, which is also what Aureal A3D did back in the day. However it lacks any form of hardware acceleration.
Unfortunately there seems to be limited information/documentation on the sound tech of half life Alyx, however this is one of the better videos with a minor caveat- Neither Phonon, SteamAudio, Or Alyx utilizes Wave tracing but rather Ray Tracing.
Interestingly enough this game was finished after SteamAudio integrated AMD TrueAudio and Radeon Rays GPU offloaded Ray traced audio but uses neither(aside from potentially using Radeon Rays during dev work to speed up audio baking.
Other related videos:
While more of an audio SDK/plugin to build into a complete audio solution, it is an interesting HRTF ray cast Spatial Audio solution. This is actually the preferred option in Returnal-one of the best examples of modern hardware accelerated ray traced audio!
Used in some games like the upcoming Modern Warfare 4, Halo Infinite, Gears of War 4/5, Sea of Thieves, Borderlands 3, among others.
Unfortunately doesn't seem to be hardware accelerated, but a cool technology nonetheless!
This is quite interesting as not only is it a custom in engine ray traced sound solution not related to any of the major players(TrueAudio, Project Acoustics for example), but it is hardware accelerated as well!
Other relevant links including a whitepaper on the tech:
https://www.massive.se/blog/news/ray-tracing-audio-in-snowdrop-creating-a-living-pandora/
https://gdcvault.com/play/1035485/GPU-Raytracing-for-Audio-in
Not related to 3d audio but still interesting video about their sound design: https://youtu.be/vkiC62psWlk?is=a-tD7cgWcJ10rRqV
Interesting article on the ray traced audio technology Apple used for their Vision Pros that may or may not make it down to other tech.
Website sucks FYI
Probably one of the best, most comprehensive videos on the decades old 3d audio war and how we ended up with EAX instead of A3D(and now have nothing... thanks creative!)
https://websim.com/@\_Neko/interactive-ray-traced-audio
https://bionichaos.com/raytraceaudio/
Vercidium also has his own version, but as of now there's no audio so it's not included.
Interesting overview of the competing spatial technology of the latest console generation. From my understanding project acoustics is ran on software(CPU) and the tempest engine is ran on dedicated silicon DSP, based on AMD TrueAudio. Project acoustics is Wave Traced, and TrueAudio can be Ray Traced.
One of the best methods I've found for this. I haven't directly compared to the THIEF method but I believe this is in theory better(albeit slightly more difficult) than DSOAL.
It's a shame this was discontinued, it was packaged as part of the nforce chipset which also included one of the first hardware accelerated network chips!
Interesting discussions on best ways to bring back EAX.
Interesting thread, the last page continues on another thread as well as provides info about software emulation of A3D.
This is going to be a very short part 1/2, where I will then show how best to go about fixing and optimizing your setup for the lowest latency, highest quality output.
View my comment as I will be able to edit that in the future.