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What Happened To PC Gaming Audio?
Thanks to The Adrenaline Vault for its feature discussing why computer audio has become a critically undervalued part of a PC purchase. The author indicates the worry that "computer audio is taken for granted, and that other components make the difference between high- and low-end systems", and voices concern that "most new [PC] computer games - including major releases - don't take advantage in any significant way of the capabilities of the latest generation of audio cards." He ends with the heartfelt wish: "I'm waiting for the day when I hear someone say, 'That game sounds so great, I have to buy it!' I hope people become more educated about audio so they can talk about it with the same enthusiasm that they discuss 3D video hardware acceleration or high definition plasma screens."
guys, the target audience, experience love with their eyes, girls with their ears, or so the old saying goes, paraphrased for lack of decent memory
H&D 1 had surround sound support and it's years and years old. It was fabulous, you could hear yourself getting shot from all sorts of directions.
But seriously.
Recently I bought a Creative Labs Audigy 2ZX, a reasonably good quality gaming card, sitting just below professional audio specifications.
The Audigy 2 ZX supports EAX4 and EAX3 audio standards. EAX3 makes a tremendous difference in 5.1 audio output when gaming, it's very precise and the environmental effects are amazing to listen to. The quality of output is vastly superior to any onboard sound solution.
Nonetheless, very few games use EAX3, I don't know of any that use EAX4. But for the games that do, the difference is noticeable.
Also, the Audigy ZX is very independant of the CPU when gaming, so when you do play games with full audio, you get better performance from your hardware. Many review sites run benchmarks with the audio disabled for the game, just to remove that area of confusion - however this makes benchmarks even more obfuscated from real world performance.
So there are two reasons why you can benefit from a little spending on your game audio. But unless you're a particularly hardcore audiophile, most mainboards have onboard 5.1 sound nowadays. So no real need to splurge, unless you want the luxury, or the cutting edge responsiveness from your hardware, or the trippy environmental effects.
I am government man, come from the government. The government has sent me. -- G.I.R.
The answer is very simple - audio drivers are *SO* incredibly bad that they can't be relied upon for anything more than the absolute bare minimum functions.
Working at a well known PC game studio, we (and many other studios) have had to implement all audio mixing in software, only using the soundcard for raw playback.
That wonderful audio card you have? It's no more useful than on-board audio.
Don't like the situation? Neither do we - blame Creative and the other manufacturers who constantly pump out junk drivers.
I can see where your coming from with this article but really when you think about it, sound is just not that big of an issue, in games or any other application.
:E
Given that most people will listen to games with headphones or a set of desktop speakers, what is the point of improving sound quality. The classic example, I think, is Metal Gear Solid 2. Apparently in parts of the game dolby surround sound was of a major advantage in game. But who even HAS surround sound? No-one I know. And who on EARTH has surround sound on their PC?
Most people also aren't big into sound quality. The tone deaf masses usually encode at 128kbps and like it! (I know I do) Top this off with the fact that even stereo sound is technically quite difficult to implement and that most programmers aren't versed in phonic theory, you can see why most users could buy a ten year old sound card and see no loss of quality.
(N.B. The author still thinks music from old sonic games is groovy. As such its comments should be modded down at the earliest possible moment.)
May the Maths Be with you!
..is plenty.
almost all modern mobos have that built in, if the da's shit it's still good enough. very few of us are hifi freaks, people just don't care that much about something that isn't going to save a crappy game anyways. If the audio would be the only thing making you want to play the game, why the hell not just put some music on?
on the other hand there's plenty of games with superb audio, but audio isn't just about 'quality' as such - the one game I played shitloads just for the audio was Star Control 2.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
its easier to tell the difference between a DVD and a Divx of the same movie than it is to tell the difference between an audio cd and an mp3 of the same song. heck, most people cant even tell the difference if you play the one after the other.
now why exactly is that sort of person going to fork out more cash for better hardware with features they probably wont even notice? I know im not paying the extra bucks for an audigy3 (or whatever the latest and greatest may be) when these days built in sound or an old SBLive sound exactly the same to my ears
TIAEAE!
One game whose sound effects grabbed me lately was Call of Duty - there are superb stereo effects when all the bullets and explosions are flying around.
I think one reason that we don't see Games taking advantage of the latest gee-whiz auto card features is that PC audio cards have been able to deliver realism for a long time now. Sounds are sampled, environmental processing effects applied (which are, in the main, not processor intensive enough to require much hardware acceleration) and, with a decent pair of stereo speakers - to say nothing of a 5.1 system, the effect is realistic enough that you feel immersed in the game. The same is only just becoming true of 3D graphics with the current state-of-the-art hardware, and there's still a long way to go.
As many people point out, for the unwashed masses who cannot tell the difference between a 128kbps MP3 and the original audio, pro-level audio soundcards like the Audigy are just overkill and will remain in the domain of the musician and those who care about sound quality. We are a lot more forgiving about audio quality than visual quality; I know I will happily listen to a LW radio broadcast, but I find a low signal TV broadcast unwatchable.
Until games use more audio gimmicks; real-time physically modelled sounds generated on the fly for example, we will have no requirements over those currently implemented on all on-board audio.
You want to hear people rave about sound, then it will have to be sold to them. In movies this already happens in the cinema, which makes people want their own home-entertainment system. Since there's no similar event for gaming (appart from cult-gatherings, etc), how many people will consider it an issue? At the same time, the integration of game-consoles into existing entertainment systems has raised the attention-level a bit.
There's also the matter of soundtracks, which is an underused option in games. A great soundtrack will make me want to see a movie and vice versa.
All that being said, I have not really found sound in games lacking, even though I have $7 pc-speakers. I find wearing earphones actually gives me an advantage in games like counterstrike, in which hearing the enemy approach is of vital importance.
There has in fact already been a game that people bought for the sound. Friends of mine actually went out and upgraded their PC sound purely to get a better play experience out of Thief: The Dark Project (1998). It was one of the first games that used positional sounds as an integral part of the game, making for an innovative play style that spawned the stealth genre which now also includes games like Metal Gear Solid and Splinter Cell. Thief works slightly differently to the other Stealth games, since you are very weak in open confrontation. Not paying attention to certain important sounds (like a guard's footsteps for example) can lead to a swift and painful death. This new genre is very successful at the moment, with sequels for all three games mentioned coming out this year - Thief 3: Deadly Shadows, Metal Gear Solid 3 and Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow, all of which have received good to excellent reviews.
Playing poker with a joker and some Uno cards
As far as I've seen in my limited life experiences, nobody reallly cares about the audio quality, all they wanna do is turn it up real loud and if it sounds kinda good then, thats all they really need
As much as I like neat sound effects and what not, I don't think it's really necessary for video games to use more sophisticated processing for audio.
I would rather the developers spend more time choosing and mixing sounds more carefully. I've played at least a few wonderful games with sounds and music that don't go well together, drown each other out, or are just plain annoying. And let us not forget games that are any combination of those.
There's nothing like a great game that sounds and looks great, and a good ear and eye can make reasonably low tech game achieve that.
-B
I'm waiting for the day when I hear someone say, 'That game sounds so great, I have to buy it!'
I'm a semi-pro musician, and I was discussing coding Csound instruments with a friend of mine the other day. We were lamenting the lack of a centralized online repository of free instruments, but the problem is the number of instruments to wade through quickly becomes unmanageable (easy to recognize, difficult to solve). Why is this?
Because audio clips can't really be shown as thumbnails. Where you can show one page of sized down images and have the surfer quickly navigate to whatever catches his eye, there is no parallel for audio clips. They essentially must be listened to independently and sequentially. And of course people won't take the time for this.
That's why people don't get as excited about game sound. Marketers can't use it to affect excitement. They can't demo it [intuitively] on web pages, print ads, or even on the game boxes themselves, so graphics are used solo for promotion.
1. DOOM3 is using an extremely advanced (and impressive) audio system. There is an excellent write-up of it here. For an atmospheric game like DOOM3, that sounds absolutely perfect.
2. Beware the Sound Blaster Audigy 2 Platinum if you are a gamer. It sounds fantastic, but the live drive (or whatever the Augidy 2 generation 5.25" sized input access is called), consistantly crashed games in my system (3000+, 9800 Pro, 1 GB RAM). To my surprise, when I disconnected the live drive and left the PCI card in, everything ran beautifully again. I always thought it was my viedo card acting up, but when Quake3 started crashing consistantly I had to do some investigation and to my surprise the Audigy was the guilty party.
Anyone who's ever played the Myst series of games knows that audio is at the forefront of the experience, never off at the sidelines. I recently picked up Uru, the now not-so-online sequel to Myst. I have to say, it has some of the most immersive audio I've ever experienced with a game since Riven. A ton of work had to have gone into it to get all the distinct sounds, write the music, and put it all into a package that supports EAX so well you can close your eyes and just listen to the ambience.
Just my opinion, but I think there are a rare few developers out there that already have this down pat.
"I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar."
-Hoban Washburn
There hasn't been much in the way of audio for PCs because there's a lack of competition these days. There doesn't seem to be much innovation.
:)
Back in the day there was the good old A3D vs. EAX debates. Things steadily improved as Aureal and Creative Labs tried to outdo each other. Sadly, Aureal couldn't hack it and bowed down to CL. Soon after, CL became complacent (in my opinion).
Playing Half-Life with A3D and four speakers was so cool!
So most spiffy new games require spiffy new and FAST computers. Most new fast computers have a baseline noise level which is not so quiet, expecially after you drop in your turbine powered GPU.
Most audiophile-type distinctions in terms of fine quality can only be made in relative silence. I am not an audiophile, but I can tell a nice system when I hear it, but only with no background noise.
Therefore, for most people not blessed with silent hardcore gaming PCs (and even those who are but live in loud areas), the distinction is virtually impossible to make without the sound turned up so far that neighbors in the next zip code are complaining.
This is exactly why when I went to visit someone and they had an $8,000 plasma TV with a cooling fan I thought it was the dumbest thing ever. It totally defeated the purpose of the $5,000 sound system's capabilities.
As shown on Deaf Gamers, there's a significant amount of games that omit features that make it possible to play without sound. In particular:
Of course, the amount of information gained from audio is being messed up in some aspects - in some cases, the noise is too low to be certain, while in others, it's being overshadowed by my CPU/Powersupply fan. (And I'm still looking for an easy way to quiet it down and take care of the heat problem as well. I have heard something that takes care of sound, but the heat problem still remains. )
On my recently purchases HP desktop I have an integrated Realtek ALS650 chipset with built in 5.1 sound. Its light years above my old computer and if Soundblaster has something better I dont care because its not better enough for me to spend $100 on.
The biggest issue that I have with sounds in games is that many companies seem to have put the bare minimum into their development, especially in comparison to the video. I hate playing a visually stunning game only to get voice sets that sound like Kermit in a tin can or sword fights that sound like dropping silverware in a drawer.
Given the current state of things, I don't even care about 5.1 audio. Reasonably good headphones like the Sennheisers HD280 Pros that I am using now have made a bigger difference to my gaming experience than any external audio system that I have used. Rather than effects, I hope that the developers spend more time making the sounds interesting, informative and appropriate.