cageymaru

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Steam Audio Beta 15 has added support for ray-tracing via the open-source AMD Radeon Rays technology. Steam Audio can use ray tracing to bake indirect sound propagation as sounds bounce around a scene until they hit a source. Thousands of ray tracing probes can be used in a scene and AMD Radeon Rays technology can speedup this operation up to 150x as it is GPU-accelerated and works on any modern AMD, Nvidia, or other GPU. "Reverb bakes that required an hour using the built-in ray tracer with a single thread should now take less than a minute using Radeon Rays on a Radeon RX Vega 64 GPU."

What is Radeon Rays?

Radeon Rays is a software library that provides GPU-accelerated algorithms for tracing coherent rays (direct light) and incoherent rays (global illumination, sound propagation). Radeon Rays is highly optimized for modern GPUs, and provides OpenCL and Vulkan backends. Steam Audio uses the OpenCL backend, which requires a GPU that supports OpenCL 1.2 or higher.
 
My favorite words in this were open source. Yes, I did notice that AMD.

An now nVidia will come out with what is virtually the same thing but will only be hardware accelerated on nVidia cards and the version used with non-nVidia setups will be completely software based and on top of that will use on-purpose super-slow code just like they do with PhysX.
 
An now nVidia will come out with what is virtually the same thing but will only be hardware accelerated on nVidia cards and the version used with non-nVidia setups will be completely software based and on top of that will use on-purpose super-slow code just like they do with PhysX.
I doubt it. Nvidia doesn't mess with too much outside of graphics, even as closely related as this is. I think they'd be happy to just reuse AMD's work here.
 
I like how its using something that is hardware based and is guaranteed to be used and upgraded in the future. Since its open source Nvidia can use it as well.
 
What? You mean you DONT have to have proprietary hardware and proprietary APIs to do ray tracing? Imagine that...
 
Good sound engineering for games is critically important and has gone relatively untapped for decades. This is some very good news.
 
Realistic audio for me is actually more important than what graphics ray-tracing promises. I guess since I like the "stealth" approach when offered in a game, that may be why!
 
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