AMD Radeon TrueAudio , What does it really do?

[Obzoleet]

Hello

I have been planning on investing in a graphic card soon, At the moment my eyes are focused on the AMD R9 290X.

It comes with the feature TrueAudio , Which sounds awesome indeed!

Who wouldn't want it? I know I want it, but I don't have a clue what it is,


Amd describes it as following on their website:

" With the sonic brilliance of AMD TrueAudio1 technology, your games now sound as good as they look. More acoustic bandwidth and capabilities for developers to play with, plus a healthy slug of extra audio performance make for a richer in-game soundscape. "

Does this mean there is something close to a soundcard in the GPU or does it add features to your own soundcard meaning you must have an actual sound card to be able to benefit from this feature?

Do you have any idea what it actually does and can put it in easy context so a retard like me can understand?

Best regards

Obzoleet

 

[cliffordcooley]

Without knowing myself, I'm going to say it sounds something like depth of field for visuals. Making audio sound as if it can be judged by how far away it is meant to be and the direction of which it is heard, by adjusting the strength of each sound within specific speakers. Probably a software implementation that can be turned on or off, depending on user choice and supporting graphics card.

 

[hellokitty[hk]]

It's an exciting time to make a GPU purchase but for your own sake, relax and be patient until the cards are actually out.
Don't worry so much, you're 100% guaranteed a great card at a great price if you wait up a bit until the cards are released and price drops ensue.

 

[Obzoleet]

Ye

It's an exciting time to make a GPU purchase but for your own sake, relax and be patient until the cards are actually out.
Don't worry so much, you're 100% guaranteed a great card at a great price if you wait up a bit until the cards are released and price drops ensue.

It is indeed!

Yeah...I can see myself waiting to November at least....perhaps I should buy it to myself as a birthday present in December....

 

[GhostRyder]

If im reading it correctly (Since its not officially out, we can only judge based on what is said by AMD), its a way the card makes the sounds more "Realistic" when a game outputs a sound and the card interprets it like what Clifford said in a sense where its just judging the audio to sound more like it would based on location of you, the unit, or whatever. It sounds cool, but we will just have to see if its worth the hype in the end game or if its just another add on, because I still believe its going to be up to how far the game goes in audio quality for the card to make those judgments.

 

[Jad Chaar]

I watched the livestream of the GPU14 conference. I only saw like 10-15 minutes of the TrueAudio presentation before I was interrupted, but this is what I understood from their vague explanation: It is basically a sound engine that provides developers with the ability to create cinema-like positional audio. This basically means that developers can program the audio so that say for example, an explosion in a game like Battlefield 3 occurs behind you, the audio is able to replicate it so that you notice, "oh, an explosion occurred behind me". It is very similar to Surround Sound but it is just a more programmable version I guess.

The problem with it, is that AMD did not specify whether it will be transcoded through the CPU or through the GPUs idle resources. I would wait till AMD answers these questions since that could results in a minor performance hit. Just wait and see like hellokitty said.