You're not helping. You are conflating audio output quality in terms of how many speakers it gest spread across with the actual processing of audio files to adjust to gameplay interaction. Having 2 more channels to output doesn't significantly affect your processing. Doing totally different filtering and synthesizing does.
No I think you're the one who's conflating here, there are several games that were talked about on B3D by ERP and others in which the very process of doing audio itself was extensively different on each platform not just the channels or the compression. Do a google search with the modifer "site:beyond3d.com" and search for Battlefield (or DICE) audio you should find some talks on exactly how different the two systems handled audio that extend further than merely quality.
astrograd said:
They will likely keep the CPU loads at parity if at all possible and shuffle audio processing to PS4's CU's. I already explained why they will go that route over trying to notably alter physics or AI and incur tons of additional play testing and bugs.
Which again using PS4's CPU is the base for engines then they'll simply do "good enough" audio along with everything else you're mentioning then on the XBO one version they'll shuttle the audio off to SHAPE and expand said audio if they feel so inclined (bkilian doesn't think vast majority of developers are even going to use 50% of SHAPE's capabilities for reasons already explained) which is basically how it's been handled since...forever. It's not nearly as set in stone as you're trying to convey.
astrograd said:
They will create those audio engines knowing that PS4 has CU's to offload them to. They aren't going to just not use those CU's just for s***s 'n giggles. It's pretty straightforward as is. Ya NEED to avoid disparities in AI and physics handled on the CPU end and you gotta do audio processing somewhere...hey look, free CU's that we aren't using! Voila. Wanna use them for graphics instead? Fine, but ya don't get jack s*** for a visual payoff and all ya did was create more costs for your game budget and ya STILL have nowhere to handle audio. Devs will wanna keep things as identical as possible and the way to do that is obvious; same CPU loads, use CU's for audio on PS4, exploit smaller areas like the other CU's and display planes and whatnot on the contours.
Those "CUs" aren't sitting there not being used, especially when you have many developers speaking about moving some if not all of their physics and collisions off to the CUs for their engines, and many are already doing GPGPU accelerated effects on the GPU. And for some reason you're under the impression that CUs would be slaved off doing audio the entire time or that it would take 4CUs which won't be the case at all.
And you are correct devs will want to keep things as identical as possible which is why they'll use PS4's CPU as base because it's the lowest common denominator. Not really that hard to understand, hell I'll use a next gen game as an example. This is the snippet of actual CPU load of a next gen game (not cross gen either).
60
AI characters
‣
940
Entities, 300 Active
‣
8200
Physics objects (1500 keyframed, 6700 static)
‣
500
Particle systems
‣
120
Sound voices
‣
110
Ray casts
‣
1000
Jobs per frame
if this was being ported to XBO, then lets look at what can be moved and expanded upon. Obviously we can move sound voices (well assume this is filtering/mixing) to SHAPE and even increase the number now we have some free cycles, as a result we can increase the number of physics objects to 8400, maybe even increase the particle systems output to 600 (obviously I don't truly know how much can be increased with the move to audio).
Lemme know when you wanna come visit reality Ketto. No AAA devs agree with you on this. You're not even close to in the ballpark of being right on this one.
Other than EPR, Bkilian and Shifty agreeing with me. Audio is easily the last thing the average gamer cares about, they don't care if game sounds have 3 bounces versus a platform in which it only has 1. The average gamer cares about audio quality nearly as much as they care about resolution of their games. Developers could use the same audio from PS3/360 on their PS4/XBO and vast majority of people wouldn't even notice nor would they care which coincidentally...cross plaform games most definitely are, they'll probably do extra with SHAPE but again lowest common denominator. If The Last of Us was ported to 360 it's audio would be scaled back tremendously and a much more simple approach would be implemented, but I'd bet several thousands of dollars that the average gamer won't notice the difference.
AAA developers care obvious because they spend time on the audio, but the people who consume their games definitely don't. Which is why many games have "good enough" audio. As I said back on TXB you can count the number of games doing raycast or raycast-esque audio on one hand, and they're all on PS3. And I'm willing to bet if you asked the average gamer to name the most "immersive" sounding games, vast majority of them won't name any of those PS3 games. Audiophiles are a ridiculously small subset of the average person who consumes entertainment. If people cared about audio then the MP3 format would have died out ages ago, s***ty headphones wouldn't be a thing, vast majority of gamers wouldn't play their game with the audio coming from their TV speakers, Beats by Dre wouldn't be the best selling headphones. Sorry but you'll find that most gamers don't give a s*** about immersive sounds and quite happy with "good enough."
I'll leave the words of someone who actually knows what they're talking about.
Someone Who Actually Knows What They're Talking About said:
SHAPE, if it were utilized 100% at all times, would be hard to equal in CPU, yes. But they don't need to equal it. For one, it's using better, but more expensive algorithms, for which the cheaper versions work fine, and have been used for the last generation without complaint. And second, It's highly doubtful that it will be utilized 100% for most games. I'd be surprised if developers used even 50% of it's capabilities for most titles.
By the time developers are looking to push the capabilities of the audio block, I suspect using GPU compute audio will be well understood and a reasonable solution.
He's right and he's
FAR more knowledgeable than you on this subject. Which is exactly how it's going to play out. GPGPU accelerated audio is going to be a rarity that only a handful of developers utilize, and until that time filtering/mixing will be handled on the CPU on PS4 and ported to XBO in which it will be moved over to SHAPE.
Yeah, all the stuff they are saying isn't really adding up.