3 ms·
> or having sound cards full of synthethizers that could create new audio on the fly. To be fair, realtime synthesis just became obsolete for most purposes onc
by Sharlin 4y ago
> or having sound cards full of synthethizers that could create new audio on the fly.
To be fair, realtime synthesis just became obsolete for most purposes once CD quality digitized audio became cheap enough to store (and later, to stream). And for musicians, once CPUs became fast enough, SW synthesis with its limitless possibilities took over from HW synthesis.
- gnramires 4y agoSomething like (fragment?) shaders for audio would be amazing though. Or maybe just an embedded low power CPU (running realtime). I think there's a lot of room for generative audio still (or various degrees of "rendering audio"), or applying distortions like doppler, various reverbs, or just generating things on the fly via synthesis, you can do things like make each effect unique and have various custom parameters (material pairs, impact velocity, room conditions, etc.). I think full 3d audio is a different problem though because it, at least, requires a version of the rendering problem (for waves). It's harder in some ways than light rendering (because phase/coherence matters sometimes, the wave equation is harder to solve), but easier in others (no need as much detail as light, wavelength is large), or just plain weird (nonlinear effects from rattling and such).
- EnigmaCurry 4y agoGenerating sound on the GPU via shaders is definitely a thing. There's a bunch on shadertoy that do just that : https://www.shadertoy.com/results?query=&sort=popular&filter=soundoutput https://www.shadertoy.com/results?query=&sort=popular&filter...
- Arcanum-XIII 4y agoThere’s still sound card with programmable DSP, quite often used to replicate high end effects. They cost a lot - and every plug-in are specialized to a brand. Still quite useful because the quality of those are very high, and don’t impact the recording process. Or there’s still some “generic” box (I mean that you can program yourself) like the Symbolic Sound Kyma Capybara. They’re quite niche thought, like modular synth.
- bick_nyers 4y agoSounds kinda like ray tracing and physically based rendering to me
- Tangurena2 4y agoAlso, disk space became cheap enough that the game could store audio files (such as MP3s) instead of generating the audio on the fly by the sound card. I remember Age of Empires (released 1997) music were MIDI files and the "instruments" would be changed by the game's code to make the music sound much better. EverQuest (1999) also started with MIDI files but later expansions replaced the music with MP3 files.
- happymellon 4y agoSurely this is like the raytracing scenario for GPUs. There are always slightly harder, and better ways of doing something which the accelerators are better at. Audio acceleration I guess peaked too early or they just couldn't get the tech demos as impressive as graphics. I remember reading about a demo, which I believe was from Matrox. They managed to get an audio 3D environment working over a pair of stereo headphones which was good enough that you could play Doom headless. Just close your eyes and you could tell where people were. A lot of what I read about here is that prerecorded samples is good enough, in the same way that raster lighting is good enough and raytracing is a waste of time.
- Sharlin 4y agoDiminishing returns. But IIRC the thing that killed 3D audio was patent wars, like what happened to force feedback.
- Godel_unicode 4y agoHuh? Force feedback and 3d audio both very much still exist.
- happymellon 4y agoI honestly think it is the same as the iGPU. It is cheap enough that it is bundled with everything. But that doesn't make it better than a discrete GPU/Audio chip. Intel GPUs are barely good enough to run an OS desktop yet they hold the majority of the market.
- 4y ago