Audio Programmer from Dice Gives Information on Frostbite
Johnrondot sent this information to me about katamakel, one of the DICE audio programmers, answering some audio questions about frostbite:
A very good find. Thanks johnrondot for the information. Its nice to hear from the audio side of the game. I know we've had some questions about sound in the forums. Does this answer a few things? Thanks also to katamakel for being so detailed.
Source
Hi there forum people, I'm one of the audio programmers at DICE responsible for the audio tech in Frostbite. repii sent me here to hopefully clarify some things. So here we go.
1. All platforms we presently target use software mixing in favor of the older hardware mixing engines. For PC, with Windows Vista switching to software mixing to get around hardware limitations and provide more powerful APIs (DirectSound was designed around the old ISA bus) with added support for things like custom DSP effects in the mixing pipeline, we could finally have a unified path for all SKUs. While the hardware acceleration provided by current gaming cards does provide the ability to do limited mixing and some environmental (reverb) effects without much CPU cost, the APIs are restricting (AFAIK, no custom DSP chains in HW) and it would demand much work from our side to work around that, if it's even possible. <!--more-->
2. Looking at some usage metrics at Steam Hardware Survey we can see that only about 3.7% of Steam users have access to any type of hardware acceleration features, although it seems to be increasing slightly. Granted, this is not necessarily the most reliable source, but it's the best one we have access to and it's usually a great indicator of what our target audience uses. Had we relied on hardware accelerating sound cards for our audio engine we would have provided a degraded experience for almost 97% of consumers. We want all our consumers to have an awesome aural experience when playing our games, so obviously we will do what fits that goal best given the resources we have available. We simply can't afford to support more than one path.
3. Regarding availability of hardware to test on, given that we would've gone down that path, I'll simply say that we used to have a discount from that big sound card manufacturer, but several years ago that disappeared. It's not like with Intel and the graphics cards companies who send repii all their new toys We simply cannot afford to go our and buy lots of cards, which is another upside to software mixing, we don't have to since all our features work on all cards equally. This saves both money and time and allows us to deliver greater quality to all of you.
4. I know PC gamers are constantly looking for that edge over the console crowd, so I'll say this about performance, since this is that type of thread. If you have a faster CPU, our audio engine will be able to do more "stuff" in the same amount of time, and as such provide an even more awesome experience for you guys. This is however not something we would be able to do had we used hardware acceleration, since those resources are the same for everyone (kind of like on consoles, ironically enough). So just know that as you buy better computers, our engine will scale fairly well along with it. Even more so in future revisions of the engine.
5. If you truly want the best audio experience, in any game on PC, focus on finding a sound card with a good DAC and make sure you can turn as much post-processing as possible off and that you have some nice speakers. Any "enhancements" made to the signal after we send it to the sound hardware may introduce unwanted artifacts. Our sound designers take great care to mix the game and even master it thoughtfully depending on the settings available in our in-game options menu, so to get the true intended experience, stay away from additional EQs or other effects. This of course goes for home theatre receivers and TVs when playing on consoles as well. They even author specific content for the LFE, so make sure you turn that woofer up! But who am I to say what you can and can't do with your audio!
I hope this information sheds some light on how we're thinking, and the audio department here at DICE would like to thank everyone in forums and video comments for their kind words about the audio in our games!
Thanks for listening.
1. All platforms we presently target use software mixing in favor of the older hardware mixing engines. For PC, with Windows Vista switching to software mixing to get around hardware limitations and provide more powerful APIs (DirectSound was designed around the old ISA bus) with added support for things like custom DSP effects in the mixing pipeline, we could finally have a unified path for all SKUs. While the hardware acceleration provided by current gaming cards does provide the ability to do limited mixing and some environmental (reverb) effects without much CPU cost, the APIs are restricting (AFAIK, no custom DSP chains in HW) and it would demand much work from our side to work around that, if it's even possible. <!--more-->
2. Looking at some usage metrics at Steam Hardware Survey we can see that only about 3.7% of Steam users have access to any type of hardware acceleration features, although it seems to be increasing slightly. Granted, this is not necessarily the most reliable source, but it's the best one we have access to and it's usually a great indicator of what our target audience uses. Had we relied on hardware accelerating sound cards for our audio engine we would have provided a degraded experience for almost 97% of consumers. We want all our consumers to have an awesome aural experience when playing our games, so obviously we will do what fits that goal best given the resources we have available. We simply can't afford to support more than one path.
3. Regarding availability of hardware to test on, given that we would've gone down that path, I'll simply say that we used to have a discount from that big sound card manufacturer, but several years ago that disappeared. It's not like with Intel and the graphics cards companies who send repii all their new toys We simply cannot afford to go our and buy lots of cards, which is another upside to software mixing, we don't have to since all our features work on all cards equally. This saves both money and time and allows us to deliver greater quality to all of you.
4. I know PC gamers are constantly looking for that edge over the console crowd, so I'll say this about performance, since this is that type of thread. If you have a faster CPU, our audio engine will be able to do more "stuff" in the same amount of time, and as such provide an even more awesome experience for you guys. This is however not something we would be able to do had we used hardware acceleration, since those resources are the same for everyone (kind of like on consoles, ironically enough). So just know that as you buy better computers, our engine will scale fairly well along with it. Even more so in future revisions of the engine.
5. If you truly want the best audio experience, in any game on PC, focus on finding a sound card with a good DAC and make sure you can turn as much post-processing as possible off and that you have some nice speakers. Any "enhancements" made to the signal after we send it to the sound hardware may introduce unwanted artifacts. Our sound designers take great care to mix the game and even master it thoughtfully depending on the settings available in our in-game options menu, so to get the true intended experience, stay away from additional EQs or other effects. This of course goes for home theatre receivers and TVs when playing on consoles as well. They even author specific content for the LFE, so make sure you turn that woofer up! But who am I to say what you can and can't do with your audio!
I hope this information sheds some light on how we're thinking, and the audio department here at DICE would like to thank everyone in forums and video comments for their kind words about the audio in our games!
Thanks for listening.
A very good find. Thanks johnrondot for the information. Its nice to hear from the audio side of the game. I know we've had some questions about sound in the forums. Does this answer a few things? Thanks also to katamakel for being so detailed.
Source
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