Steam Audio 2.0 Adds AMD TrueAudio Next Support

Written by Michael Larabel in Valve on 9 February 2018 at 11:29 AM EST. 25 Comments
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Valve has added support for the AMD/GPUOpen TrueAudio Next within the latest beta of SteamAudio 2.0.

Steam Audio as a refresher is Valve's full-featured spatial audio solution designed for VR and gaming audio in general. Steam Audio can be enabled into Unreal Engine 4, Unity, and other game engines with also having a C API. SteamAudio does support Linux.

TrueAudio Next meanwhile is AMD's current generation solution for dealing with advanced audio capabilities while using the GPU driven via OpenCL. Unlike TrueAudio with the dedicated DSP, TrueAudio Next delivers advanced audio effects using OpenCL kernels. The TrueAudio Next SDK has been open-source since 2016 even though AMD doesn't officially support it on Linux at the moment.

This news is still important though for Linux gamers as hopefully this year we will see official TrueAudio Next support on Linux, since after all it's implemented in OpenCL. Additionally, with the Linux 4.17 kernel is when we are seeing ROCm/OpenCL beginning to work on the mainline Linux kernel for select GPUs, making it much easier for Linux gamers to deploy AMD's official OpenCL compute stack. When this barrier to entry for ROCm/OpenCL is lowered and running on the mainline kernel, it's very reasonable to imagine AMD offering TrueAudio Next officially on Linux and other GPGPU expansions.

Those wishing to learn more about TrueAudio Next integration into Steam Audio 2.0 Beta can find the details via SteamCommunity.com.

The AMD folks have also published their own information at GPUOpen.com, "The TAN version used in Steam Audio has our latest OpenCL multi-core optimizations for better convolution performance with the lowest possible latency impact to the main audio rendering loop (using just 4 compute units, up to 7x lower than CPU). Steam Audio is able to leverage the TAN library’s batch convolution method to maximize GPU utilization. The optimizations used in this TAN version will be posted in an upcoming TAN update on GPUOpen."
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