Importance of AMD TrueAudio in Thief explained by Eidos Montreal

[HEXUS]

Audio is an important sense in this game either in or "out of the shadows".

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[dfour]

this could be an interesting game for 290/x owners to try if you enjoy a bit of stealth now and again.

[shaithis]

Can't see any info about what cards are supported by this new audio mode....

Also, no mention of mantle, i'd like to think they were going to push technologies together......

Now awaiting the first title with TrueAudio and/or Mantle with physx support.....just to cause ultimate confusion.

[kalniel]

Kind of needs to go with mantle to be honest, because at the moment we've got so much spare CPU hanging around there's no need to accelerate audio.

[krazy_olie]

Can't see any info about what cards are supported by this new audio mode....

Also, no mention of mantle, i'd like to think they were going to push technologies together......

Now awaiting the first title with TrueAudio and/or Mantle with physx support.....just to cause ultimate confusion.

I remember that there's an article on anandtech somewhere which said which cards had it.

Bit silly, considering this existed for ages with Creative cards then due to various forces, including the vista/7 sound stack and Creative's incompetence that it's taken a graphics company to redo 3d audio again.

[scaryjim]

Can't see any info about what cards are supported by this new audio mode....

290/290X, 260X, Kaveri and Kabini APUs (iirc) - in other words anything with GCN 1.1

Kind of needs to go with mantle to be honest, because at the moment we've got so much spare CPU hanging around there's no need to accelerate audio.

erm ... Mantle will also reduce CPU load. Mantle + TrueAudio means we can probably all go back to Pentium 4s Or more to the point, Mantle + TrueAudio means AMDs low end APUs will shine in games that use them both, as they won't need anywhere near as much CPU power. Mobile Kaveri, I'm looking at you...

[watercooled]

It sounds (pun intended) like this will use the Trueaudio hardware if available, but won't penalise you (besides potentially higher CPU utilisation) for not having a card that supports it. Certainly the right way to go about thing IMO. Better than needlessly locking people out from features if they have different hardware *coughPhysXcough*.

[kalniel]

erm ... Mantle will also reduce CPU load.

Mantle reduces queued single-threaded CPU calls primarily. It will possibly increase short, threaded calls, that can scale to more CPUs.

[Percy1983]

I am sure this is why I have a dedicated sound card, good old x-fi at that.

[Jimbo75]

Kind of needs to go with mantle to be honest, because at the moment we've got so much spare CPU hanging around there's no need to accelerate audio.

I don't think that's how it works - the CPU isn't really "spare" as such, it's more like tied up while doing nothing. I think most audio just lowers performance on the main thread by even more.

On the flipside, Mantle and TrueAudio probably aren't needed together because Mantle frees up so much CPU anyway.

[kalniel]

I don't think that's how it works - the CPU isn't really "spare" as such, it's more like tied up while doing nothing. I think most audio just lowers performance on the main thread by even more.

On the flipside, Mantle and TrueAudio probably aren't needed together because Mantle frees up so much CPU anyway.

With dx stack one or two cores are tied up while the rest do nothing, hence are free for audio. With mantle the load will be better spread to all cores. There's less load too, which should help, but currently audio is effectively free.

[watercooled]

I guess there's some marketing involved in this, but I guess we could see more advanced audio taking up more CPU resources. It's not necessarily a concern for higher end CPUs, but it may help improve performance where there are only a few cores available. And being dedicated logic, it could mean better power efficiency in any case?

[zdn1042]

Really looking forward to this game. Hope it's awesome.

[kalniel]

I guess there's some marketing involved in this, but I guess we could see more advanced audio taking up more CPU resources. It's not necessarily a concern for higher end CPUs, but it may help improve performance where there are only a few cores available. And being dedicated logic, it could mean better power efficiency in any case?

I think unless hardware accelerated audio became an open standard (perhaps as part of a proper open version of openAL) then it'll be limited to those devs who have an incentive to spend the cost coding it, and hence yet another proprietary division in PC hardware which would suck.

As for power efficiency.. depends - how much processing power is needed for accelerated audio, and which kind of processing architecture does it best suit? And can a GPU access the underlying data without having to ask the CPU to fetch resources each time? I guess audio data might small compared to object/texture data, but it's yet another thing to call up from the disk. The XBone's move engines start making sense to me.