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Unreal Tournament 2003, Now With More Ogg

Posted by michael on from the camping-out dept.

Alizarin Erythrosin writes "Unreality is running an article today about a hands on preview of Unreal Tournament 2003. An interesting bit was on page 2, saying that Ogg Vorbis is being used to compress the audio for the game." A nice screenshot demonstrates some of the eye-candy.

3 of 181 comments (clear)

  1. Re:I have a silly question by RelliK · · Score: 5, Insightful
    Why would you want to have any sort of audio compression taking up CPU cycles in a game that is so processesor depedent?

    1. Any recent FPS is not CPU-limited. It is video card-limited. (Except for really low resolution, color depth, and detail, but nobody plays that any more).

    2. On modern CPUs, MP3s take about 1% - 3% load to play. I expect ogg to be similar.

    In short, CPU usage is a non-issue.

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  2. Consumers use MP3 because it has integer decoders by yerricde · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Perhaps this will encourage the semi-tech crowd (the casual gamer type mostly) to use Ogg, and it may filter down in to the main populous who mainly uses mp3 right now.

    People still use MP3 because there are pocket-sized MP3 players, and there are pocket-sized MP3 players because efficient MP3 decoder software that uses fixed-point (integer) arithmetic is widely available. The reference Vorbis decoder still uses floating-point arithmetic, which common ARM microprocessors cannot do in real time.

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  3. Re:I have a silly question by ryanvm · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Why would you want to have any sort of audio compression taking up CPU cycles in a game that is so processesor depedent?

    For one reason - on 3D games the video card is usually the bottleneck.

    standard CD audio can be read off a disk with next to no CPU usage

    Right, but at 10MB/min for CD audio it takes up A LOT of space that could be used for textures, models, levels, etc. A half hour of music would waste half the space on a CD.