AMD launches TrueAudio Next

Under the bonnet of LiquidVR SDK

AMD has put TrueAudio Next onto Github as part of its LiquidVR SDK.

AMD is trying to tackle the same audio problems as targeted by Nvidia’s VRWorks Audio. The aim according to the brief is to:

“Create a scalable AMD technology that enables full real-time dynamic physics-based audio acoustics rendering, leveraging the powerful resources of AMD GPU Compute.”

In other words, it will give immersive audio alongside VR headsets and allow audio to catch up a bit with graphics.

Writing in the GPU Open blog, Carl Wakeland, a Fellow Design Engineer at AMD, said that the 2D screen had resulted in sound never really getting a look in. Some games had bought in 3D audio as a novelty but this could be a distraction. But head-mounted display “changes everything.”

AMD TrueAudio Next is a significant step towards making environmental sound rendering closer to real-world acoustics with the modelling of the physics that propagate sound – AKA auralisation.

The new AMD TrueAudio Next library is a high-performance, OpenCL-based real-time math acceleration library for audio, with special emphasis on GPU compute acceleration. But it is not perfect yet, although the fact it has real-time GPU compute backing it up it is pretty good, apparently.

Wakeland says that two primary algorithms need to be catered for – time-varying convolution (in the audio processing component) and ray-tracing (in the propagation component).

“On AMD Radeon GPUs, ray-tracing can be accelerated using AMD’s open-source FireRays library, and time-varying real-time convolution can be accelerated with the AMD TrueAudio Next library.”

AMD uses a new ‘CU Reservation’ feature to reserve some CUs for audio, as necessary, and the use of asynchronous compute.