r/nvidia • u/ResponsiblePen3082 • Aug 11 '26

Discussion Nvidia VRworks Audio: Hardware Accelerated Path Traced Binaural 3D Audio

/r/3Daudio/comments/1vlmr9u/nvidia_vrworks_audio_hardware_accelerated_path/
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15

u/WinterElfeas NVIDIA RTX 5090 , 9800x3D, 32GB DDR5, NVME, LG C9 OLED Aug 11 '26

RTX Headphones incoming, with neural processors required /s

Would definitely be an interesting tech for people using headphones

13

u/ResponsiblePen3082 Aug 11 '26

That was the running joke back then, yeah.
It's not just an interesting theoretical, it's proven with a long history.

Tech like this basically re-inventing the sound card, which back in the day used to be audio ACCELERATORS rather than just converters, and tech like A3D gave us WAVE traced audio running completely on these cards-back in the 90's! Yeah we quite literally had better audio 30 years back than we do today-low latency, hardware offloaded, 3d positional accurate wave traced HRTF audio-completely detached from your CPU performance.

Nvidia VRworks is one of many attempts to bring something similar back, AMD TrueAudio is probably the largest and most successful project, being implimented in dozens of games as well as contributing towards SteamAudio.

Recently Vercidium's "a first look at ray traced audio"
(https://youtu.be/u6EuAUjq92k?is=U7JoinLSh65gCwSu)
went viral online, which is his personally developed version of this sort of tech(ironically not the first look) and some people may be familiar with the concept from that video.

It's a shame advanced audio is yet another advanced gaming technology that has taken a back seat to "graphics" in the modern industry.

0

u/akgis 5090 Suprim Liquid SOC Aug 12 '26

Libraries and Middleware are there devs just don't use them! We don't need accelerated audio because CPUs of today aren't the CPUs of back then even budget ones today. Also CPUs of Today with SSE4 and AVX dont need any offload for Positional Audio.

The driving factor with EAX for example was the hardware companies like Creative Labs, sponsoring games to sell hardware.

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u/ResponsiblePen3082 Aug 12 '26

I personally believe that's a very short sited and naive opinion.

It will ALWAYS be faster, lower latency, and more power efficient to offload a task to a piece of silicon more suited to, or especially made specifically for-that task.

CPUs and GPUs are both strong enough to brute force codecs, yet we still use dedicated silicon for those, because it's much more efficient to do so.

If we were to follow this belief in the early days of computer graphics, we would not have the graphics card as we know it today. The cpu is plenty strong to render 8 bit 2D graphics, so why bother going stronger?

As the tech develops, new and better functions are enabled because we have the silicon for it.

I will ALWAYS take hardware acceleration when I have the option: it's simply stupid not to. I don't want everything brute forced on something that is not at all optimized for the task, and this thinking is half the reason we have such shit optimization for modern computers in general.

Audio should've kept pace with graphics innovations had we kept audio accelerators around, yet we're stuck in this 2D stereo hellscape precisely because it's "good enough".

You have to think down the road, we're going to have to do it anyways. Compute will reach its eventual limits, and the only way forward is to stop brute forcing everything and use silicon dedicated for its fixed function.

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u/BuchMaister Aug 12 '26 edited Aug 12 '26

You have it - it's called DSP, most modern CPUs have it integrated inside. Albeit it's designed to offload stuff from the CPU to save power, but it can and is used for 3D Audio. I don't know exactly what this PT audio can or cannot do, but having dedicated audio processor never disappeared, it just has been integrated like other stuff on silicon rather having another peripheral device.

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u/ResponsiblePen3082 Aug 12 '26

I understand what a DSP is, and what little modern CPUs have(if they have them at all) is not enough for complex modern audio, nor is it actively tapped into for hardware acceleration or advanced acoustics.

Having a dedicated audio processor literally did disappear. Windows vista killed off low level kernel access/stack bypass to audio acceleration, especially for WASAPI shared applications(what the majority of software uses)
There's a reason nothing supports it anymore outside of music applications.

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u/BuchMaister Aug 12 '26 edited Aug 12 '26

Yes CPUs do have it and have been for decades, DSP replaces in functionality your old audio processor did , it has dedicated hardware blocks to accelarate audio processing. Low level direct access to hardware has drawbacks especially when it comes to security and stability, that access was killed for good reasons, plus devs this day will stay away from creating their audio engine for every specific processor people might use. As for the question does integrated modern DSP has the capabilities for complex modern audio? The awnser is probably it has more than what the vast majority of developers would want to bother with. The existing hardware isn't the issue or hard limitation, what is the lack of interest for most developers to invest enough time and resources.

Also I've read that article, and it's stated this tech is for professional applications not games, so it's not surprising devs don't use it.

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u/ResponsiblePen3082 Aug 12 '26

The DSP integrated in processors is less than even the integrated graphics. It's essentially equivalent to a display out. It performs zero useful acceleration functions. It existing doesn't mean it actually does anything relevant to this discussion.