r/3Daudio

Nvidia VRworks Audio: Hardware Accelerated Path Traced Binaural 3D Audio
▲ 63 r/3Daudio+1 crossposts

Nvidia VRworks Audio: Hardware Accelerated Path Traced Binaural 3D Audio

7 Years ago, Nvidia released version 2.0 of the VrWorks Audio SDK, a method of using the RT cores to efficiently accelerate real time acoustics for true, 3d positionally accurate PATH TRACED HRTF binaural audio.

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.

Relevant video of the time

u/ResponsiblePen3082 — 9 days ago

Is it possible to inject a 3D audio processing like RenoDX does for HDR?

If no, why can't we? And can we do something?

reddit.com
u/Gryfvern — 9 days ago
▲ 83 r/3Daudio+1 crossposts

Nvidia SoundStorm-Yes, Nvidia made their own Sound Processor/APU/DSP that was able to hardware accelerate audio and EAX/A3D

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!

en.wikipedia.org
u/ResponsiblePen3082 — 13 days ago
▲ 9 r/3Daudio+1 crossposts

Half Life Alyx: SteamAudio Ray Traced Sound Physics

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:

https://youtu.be/jTXnZ64ehRM?is=dJU-cwhqiyKWfg4T

https://youtu.be/9CrLSQHSgvA?is=1AELUV61uugDU2C9

youtu.be
u/ResponsiblePen3082 — 9 days ago

What a cool subreddit! Thanks!

I found this place via a Google feed on my phone about the Nvidia chip. I hope this area of development returns, and I agree we don't know what we're missing due to Creative's innovation-killing monopoly.

I like my G8; despite issues, it improves my V-Moda OG M-100 cans significantly compared to mobo DACs. Thanks for reviving this subreddit!

reddit.com
u/Ok-Replacement-7217 — 13 days ago