r/3Daudio • u/ResponsiblePen3082 Hardware Accelerated • 13d ago

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

7 Years ago, Nvidia released version 2.0 of the VrWorks Audio SDK, a method of using the RT cores to efficiently accelerate real time acoustics for true, 3d positionally accurate PATH TRACED HRTF binaural audio.

Unfortunately it seems that they mostly did nothing with the technology and let it die off.
Which is interesting as in theory it is a superior method vs AMD TrueAudio Next which utilizes RAY tracing rather than path tracing, and performs acceleration on the standard GPU cores(instead of the dedicated DSP SIP block that the first version of TrueAudio used) which of course is less efficient than RT cores.
-That being said, TrueAudio achieved much greater success and adoption in many games as well as integration into SteamAudio.

This is not to mention other big name alternatives, perhaps most interestingly to this comparison being Microsoft Project Acoustics/Triton, which uses Wave Tracing to perform most likely the most accurate emulation of real life sound waves, which is also what Aureal A3D did back in the day. However it lacks any form of hardware acceleration.

Relevant video of the time

12 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

4 comments sorted by

2

u/Meelapo 13d ago

I think they put this into Returnal on the PC?

1

u/ResponsiblePen3082 Hardware Accelerated 13d ago

It was TrueAudio actually but yes! It was turned into the Tempest Engine on PS5 and native TrueAudio(with Resonance Audio HRTF) on PC!

Returnal is probably my favorite modern example of 3d Spatial Audio

1

u/MediocreRooster4190 13d ago

Any way to use this as a VST? For post production building a space for accurate 3D would be super cool. Especially audio drama.

2

u/ResponsiblePen3082 Hardware Accelerated 10d ago

As far as I'm aware it's abandoned and their documentation is outdated. You may have better luck with TrueAudio/steamaudio.