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What's Up With Computer Audio?
Mr.Tweak writes "Last month during QuakeCon it became clearly apparent that computer audio has become somewhat of a forgotten component in the computer industry when talking to gamers and listening to companies at the gaming event. We'll present some benchmark numbers of five different sound solutions as well as provide commentary along the way on our thoughts of computer audio solutions and what should be done to improve things using nVidia's SoundStorm APU as an example."
All you need is an FM-synth card and the midi that was used in the original DOOM to get your adrenaline going while gaming!
No game since has ever matched DOOM/DOOM2's music effect upon the player, in my opinion.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
If you think about it what has Creative done to anyone who has made a decent card in the past few years? they either sued them to the brink of death (Aureal), or acquired all the technologies that other developers used (sensaura) (sp?)
the only other real alternative was Nvidia which basically is suffering from cheap mainboard manufactures who wont spend the extra 50 cents on a decent DAC. the vast majority of boards with it are nowhere near soundstorm certified, thus its removal from A64 boards. I expect Intel to go the same way with their new chipset coming out too.
While I was at Quakecon (with it's roughly 10 vendors) I saw new games with amazing sounds and at least two vendors who were hyping their audio technology. They had 5.1 headphones and some incredible THX speakers from Creative. When playing Doom3 with a good audio system, I had an audio experience unlike that of any other game i've ever played.
Admittedly, there were not many vendors, but saying that audio is a forgotten component just doesn't reflect the reality of Quakecon. Or are you just trying to get readers?
Perhaps you've just noticed that reflex and knowing the maps better than your opponent are more important that hearing your bullets hit him?
Right now I currently work as a sound tech in college, and I can attest that the "problem" is not just in the computer realm. Very rarely do people care about excellent sound quality, though video quality is almost always something people are picky about. There's probably several reasons for this, but I think a lot of it has to do with people being tone deaf and putting their sight above their hearing in importance.
Audio has a far lower point of diminishing returns than does, say, graphics.
There's only so much fidelity you need for "Argghhhh" and "Kaboom" and "Zap."
Let's take Doom3 as an example.
Which would you rather have-- Doom3 on a Hammerfall pro audio card with a Voodoo2 or Doom3 on an Nvidia 6800 with a $20 Soundblaster Live?
For me, there's no contest. I do happen to have an Audiophile pro card, but it's because I make music, not because of gaming. For music applications there are SCADS of high-end cards. I just don't think the typical user needs them, unless he's some bling-fanatic who defines himself by how many of the latest, blue-LEDest IPOD-things he has.
Intolerance for ambiguity is the mark of the authoritarian personality.
For many years there were advancements in sound back in the DOS days. You could make audio sound better with 16 bits, or 44.1khz. You could do wavetable systhesis so MIDI sounded realistic (at least compared to the beeps and boops of FM systhesis). There was advancement.
Then CDs came. As games moved to CDs and hard drives got bigger, suddenly it was possible to play real music, and it didn't matter how good your MIDI was because the game producers could use real music. Now we see it in MP3s and Ogg files used to store the music.
So for a long time, the sound world has been stagnate. Years ago we saw "3D" sound, but it never took off. Creative had EAX, which simulated it somehow, and Aureal had A3D which did wave-tracing or something like that. What I can tell you was that A3D was QUITE superior. But many games didn't use it, and it did have a CPU impact. People were more interested in better 3D graphics, sound didn't seem that important. Aureal eventually died and was bought by Creative Labs. As far as I know they haven't used any of the technology that they aquired.
So without competition things stagnated. With Aureal dead, no one really cared about 3D sound. So all we've gotten is "standard" sound cards that do 2D. Sure you can get 5.1 and 7.1 and stuff, but nothing amazing. And worst of all, there are no drivers for my favorite soundcard for newer versions of Windows or for Linux (at least not without paying).
So here we are. Aureal is dead, and people are starting to care again. Now all we have is Creative. There is no real competition. But now that Doom 3 supports it (HL2 probably will too) and it's claimed that you really need it for the best expiriance you can get, things will hopefully advance again. Now that graphics are very near "good enough", perhaps sound (which in many ways hasn't changed since the SB16 as far as today's games are concerned) will catch up.
So long... Aureal.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
Um I'm sorry to have to totally disagree, but the very next iD game - Quake did something kind of evolutionary and paid a big name artist (Nine Inch Nails) to produce their music. It moved the bar far beyond anything MIDI.
:| ;)
Reading back perhaps you're being sarcastic
*DrugCheese rants*
The sad part is that most people just aren't as sensitive to sound quality. Witness the enormous numbers of people who honestly believe that MP3 (and Ogg, for that matter) sound as good as CD (and 16-bit 44.1 kHz still isn't great IMHO.) I'm a music teacher and audio engineer by profession. The other day, a student of mine was trying to convince me that his SB Audigy was a "pro" card. Seriously... Granted, my M-Audio (for the Linux box) and Digidesign (for the Mac) converters would be inappropriate for gaming, but you know audio is not a high priority for the average geek when they try to tell you that Creative makes professional-grade gear. (Disclaimer: I am an admitted audio snob, and I don't particularly care that much about graphics. My gaming takes place on an Athlon with an old S3 card [I removed the GeForce2 that was in it because it was introducing latency on the sound card], a Powerbook [yep] and a PS1).
Humans have focused on pretty much just two senses; sight and touch, especially with respect to our hands. If we want to identify something we almost always look at it or pick it up and feel it.
Our sense of smell/taste is notoriously crappy compared to many other animals and unless something is particularly smelly we usually don't pay much attention to that aspect. Our hearing is adequate and is very usefull for communicating language and for tertiary analysis but it isn't usually what we focus on.
We have very exact words for defining shape and size and color. We can say a secreen is X by Y pixels and if we have a general idea of the pixel size that gives many people a pretty good sense of the size and quality of the image. We can say it can display Z colors and although that's a little more inexact it still gives us a reasonably good idea.
On the other hand our words for describing audio in common usage are generally less specific and hace less conotation. If you say that a sound system has seven channels then i and a lot of other non-audiophiles will have very little idea what exactly that means or how it differes from more or less channels. I expect two monitors with the same stats to look pretty similar, but for audio equipment you need to go listen to it to find out which is good and which is bad.
All of which means that when making games or any other mixed media product you will get more bang for your buck if you invest more in video over sound. People will notice it more and be able to describe it better when talking to their friends or writing reviews. Good audio can certainly make a game a lot better, but how many people buy a game just because it has good audio vs. just because it has good graphics? There are certainly a few, i myself happen to know a single hardcore audiophile who builds his own speakers and such, but they're not that common.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
3d positional audio with a 5.1 dolby THC certified system can really kick ass!
Not just by scaring the daylights out of you but in Doom3 and half-life its nice to hear things behind you as well as in front.
With advanced sound algorithms you can hear how far a battle is in Unreal tournament and how fast the rocket is heading to you.
A split second by your reaction time is all it takes for you to get fragged and your opponent to claim another frag.
I dont game as much but sound is essential as well as high frame rates.
http://saveie6.com/
well, considering that no game save vice city has collected songs from such popular bands before onto a game soundtrack, I can see why you like it.
Of course Bobby Prince didn't realize he was doing MIDI covers of metal bands for Doom, but if you've heard much Alice in Chains, Pantera, Slayer, etc. it's pretty damn obvious. To try to pass that stuff off as his own work was just shameless.
Of course, it's hilariously appropriate that the Doom3 title track is a ripoff of a Tool song.
The L.C.D .doesn't have this equipment. Computers are sold with two speakers, if any, and very few people use them as a "multi-media" unit, prefering their superior home stereos.
A couple problems I see:
The computer is usually not even in the same room as the sound/entertainment system. The computer is a web/email/work machine that doubles as a gaming machine once in a while.
The computer doesn't come bundled with a really nice sound system and if offered, I doubt anyone who cared that much about sound would pay the premium knowing full well their home stereo blows it away, doesnt need reboots, etc.
The same question can be asked of computer game controllers. The consoles do a much better job of delivering games for the L.C.D. that an old fashioned keyboard is just fine for gamers. No need for some killer controller. Of course some would argue the keyboard is superior and that flight simulators need special controllers, but those are niche items. Just because they are niche items doesn't mean they are "dying."
Lastly, there are tons of 5.1 equipment for PCs for people who want them. This assumption that because it doesn't ship with the cheapest dell thus its "dying" is really pushing it.
We all like to lament the loss of Soundstorm, with it's hardware audio mixing and on the fly dolby digital encoding, but it died for two reasons, one major, one minor.
The big one was marketing. Nvidia failed, on every level, to market and push the Soundstorm APU. It wasn't advertised, it's features and abilities were no explained, and info about it was buried deep within the then current nvidia web page. Nobody knew what it was, and while everyone understood 5.1 sound on a motherboard, no one understood why nvidias was better. And by no one, I include motherboard reviewers, who would talk about the dual channel features and onboard firewire of the nforce chipset, but completely overlook the sound, failing to even mention it in most cases. This feedback lead motherboard manufacturers to question the premium nvidia charged for the solution, and often opt for the cheaper AC'97 chipsets they had in stock instead. Nvidia never published benchmark and review guidelines for the soundstorm, so nobody ever cared about it. They needed to push it's excellence as a gaming and home theater chipset, and it's ability to blend digitally with home audio setups, and never did.
The second reason is, in fact, Creative Labs. To understand, some technical details of the soundstorm are needed. The Soundstorm APU is a semi-custom DSP, not a dedicated audio solution. It runs a customized version of the Sensaura 3D engine, doing all the work on APU that is normally left to Sensaura versions that run within the drivers of other soundcard makers. Additionally, the final mix stage of this engine has had the Dolby Digital Live encoder added, allowing the 5.1 output to be packed into an AC-3 stream. In other words, Nvidia was dependent on Sensaura technology. Now, guess who just bought Sensaura? That's right! Creative Labs. Do you think they'll be licensing their new acquisition to the one company that actually competes with them? Now, they'll keep licensing it to other AC'97 makers, because who wouldn't want a cut of every motherboard ever made, and the opportunity to make more when they buy a creative soundcard to replace it?
So, it's dead. Replacing the Sensaura engine with an in house solution isn't possible, as there is to much contamination of IP, nvidia would have to hire all new dev's and engineers to clean room it. Licensing from Creative will be prohibitively expensive, and motherboard makers aren't interested in it anyway.
Why not make a PCI version? Well, the PCI bus can't handle 64 16bit/48Khz audio streams, that's more bandwitdth than PCI has. It worked fine on soundstorm, thanks to the fast north-southbridge link. You could produce a PCIe 1x card version, but nvidia would have to re-engineer a good deal of the chip to do so, and then we are back to licensing anyway.
Nvidia never made Soundstorm enough of a brand to be worth noticeing, and then killed it when the costs got to high and the support got to difficult. Strangely, drivers for the soundstorm have finally matured, with the most recent 4.31 audio producing decent sound and having wide compatibility. Ah well, looks like our next hope is the highly DRM protected Intel HDA standard. At elast it offers realtime dolby digital. Sort of.
I played Doom when it first came out through a SoundBlaster 16 and a Yamaha PSR-510. The 510's keyboard was crap, but the AWM GMIDI samples were pretty good -- and Doom sounded *GREAT*. Even better than SB16 + WaveBlaster.
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
What AMD bias? They used an AMD rig for all of the tests involved. If you read the article carefully, you see they don't claim that no other cards provide 5.1 sound. What they accurately claim is that no consumer cards other than soundstorm currently encode into AC-3 in real time. Now, while you may not care about this, this is 2004, not 1994. I assure you that many of us geeks out there ARE using 5.1 capable recievers (they are quite cheap now, have a look) and few of us like the hiss and static that is so often prevalent in PC sound. Should we _still_ be using ANALOG connections to get surround sound from a sound card? Again, it's great that the SB-Live works so well for you for $30. /cough junk /cough. I own a PC specifically as an A/V hub for my living room, and I know that I have owned 3 Nforce boards with soundstorm and all hook up instantly and flawlessly to the digital inputs on the "Best Buy Sony Special" reciever. Find me another consumer grade card that does this and provides such an excellent experience for music, video, and gaming playback, at this price point.
And while many of us audio enthusiasts and musicians own high end audio gear (I know I do), it's also been nice to be able to buy high quality MODERN sound solutions on commodity motherboards. I know that Nvidia dropping soundstorm is a big reason why my next mobo chipset will say INTEL on it.
Half-Life 1 back in '99 was doing echoes and reverb based on the size of the room, and even now in 2004, a game like Doom 3 still plays its sounds effects raw, like you're in a closet.
Half-Life's actually a lot simpler than that - in the single-player game, you control the DSP algorithm with the env_sound point entity. There are a bunch of presets, and park 'em either side of an entrance, for instance one with 'Cavern Large' and one with 'Tunnel Small', and as the player walks past their audio changes... There are only two channels processed (left and right) - if a sound plays, it gets shoved out through the DSP. You can't have some sound effects with one effect applied and others with another, it's an all-or-nothing trick.
Having said that, it can be incredibly effective, and since it's completely controlled by the mapper, you can choose effects to maximise the atmospheric effects. Who cares how big the room is, what's the most claustrophobic effect that can be applied for when the player's soemwhere they shouldn't be? And what's a much safer ambience for when they're away from danger?
Highly impressive, especially as it ran without problems in high-quality on my old P166MMX. Interestingly, the guy who wrote the DSP stuff, Kelly Bailey, also did all the music and sound effects for Half-Life. I've always felt that the audio systems in Id games were a bit of an afterthought, but Half-Life's is a major feature in the game, designed in part by the designer of what it would play...
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
One thing that shits me with gaming audio is that in the games I've played, all the effects, monsters, etc ALL SOUND THE SAME.
Eg in doom, each type of sound is exactly the same, only slightly pitch shifted. The same goes for the quake series - every sound only differs with a little pitch. Whether the surrounding geography is a small room or a huge hall, it sounds the same.
what I want to see is true dynamic audio - each sound effect being created dynamically out of base sounds, so that each time you hear a particular effect, it's sound varies according to the immediate geography - big booming echoes in large halls, crisp, close and loud shrieks in small spaces.
THAT is what would make audio advance in gaming to the next level.
Sparks:Gadget:Beer Maker
Lets travel back, way back. There was the Adlib audio. Then Creative Labs introduced the 8bit, 11Khz Sound Blaster, then the Sound Blaster Pro which added stereo. Then there was the Sounds Blaster 16, Pro Audio Spectrum 16, and the Gravis Ultrasound (GUS) back in 1991.
The GUS was way ahead of the others. It could mix up to 32 channels in hardware. It always played the sound back at 44Khz via interpolation (unless you had too many channels active at once). It had up to 1meg of on board sound memory so it could be totally independent of your CPU. The Demo scene loved it. It had faked 3d sound via QSound..
It never caught on :( Creative's control was too powerful. Even the GUS PnP which was based on the AMD Interwave sound chip failed. Eventually Gravis was bought and the exited the sound business.
Years later Aureal, attempted to bring good audio to the PC and break Creative's control with its Vortex sound card. They ran into money issues. Creative sued them. They won, but the lawsuit drained their money and they went bankrupt. Creative then bought the remains (patents) of the company.
But rumours are nVidia hired many of the out of work engineers, which developed the Sound Storm for the Xbox. Which then nVidia fortunately brought to the nForce. Which unfortunately won't be in future versions because nobody is willing to pay for it. Even if it is "free". Gamers are more interested in a "free" hardware firewall.
Looking back at how Gravis, AMD, Aureal, and others have failed despite having superior products makes me wounder how a company could successfully introduce better audio to gamers. Maybe if it helped you win at FPS games... Seeing nVidia leave the audio market is sad, but I've been sad about this many times before. I'm kind of numb to the pain of seeing a great new technology with high hopes of making things better fail due to lack of interest.
I have a feeling we'll be stuck using Intel's "Azalea" for a long long time. It's certainly not bad, but it has the CPU do the work instead of a coprocessor. What do you expect from Intel when they made a nice new DX9 graphics core, but didn't use hardware T&L? Gotta try to create a market for those faster CPUs somehow... Sure, it can output some Dolby signals if they are precomputed (i.e. DVDs), but it can't encode them if they are dynamic (i.e. games). Unless you have a really powerful CPU. Oh well, at least Intel High Definition Audio as it is officially known now beats AC'97.
From Dolby's press release:
From the SoundStorm-worshipping article:TO START
PRESS ANY KEY
Where's the 'ANY' key? I see Esk, Kitarl, and Pig-Up...
I used the Yamaha DB50XG hardware XG synth card. As an added bonus, it unloaded the CPU to make the game run smoothly. The hardware XG synth has some great sounds. If I remember correctly it used a 18 bit DA converter so it's resolution is more than a Compact Disk. Overall, nice sound and light CPU load. This was especialy important on older ISA hardware.
I've since made the synth an external stand alone sound module which I use with a MIDI keyboard.
The truth shall set you free!