[sdiy] Ray tracing hardware for audio simulation

[Ben Stuyts]

Interesting!

Somewhat related 3d audio: There was a recent episode of the Audionowcast podcast (AudioNowcast May 5, 2022 episode 228 <https://www.nowcastnetwork.com/NowcastNetwork/nfblog/?p=1007>, around the 25 minute mark) in which they talked about Fiedler Audio’s Spacelab plugin. It is a 3d audio object reverb, developed in cooperation with Fraunhofer. The demo’s (binaural, on headphone) are quite fun, although some didn’t quite work for me.

Ben


> On 30 Jul 2022, at 17:47, cheater cheater via Synth-diy <synth-diy at synth-diy.org> wrote:
> 
> Hi all,
> there was recently an AMA with ray tracing experts at nvidia and I
> asked about uses for audio. I thought the possibilities could be
> interesting for some people here. Below is the link to the original
> thread as well as a copy of the question and answer.
> 
> Cheers
> 
> 
> https://forums.developer.nvidia.com/t/meet-the-ray-tracing-gems-team-live-ama-july-28-2022/217920
> 
> -------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> Welcome to our first Connect with Experts - AMA, an exclusive benefit
> of the NVIDIA Developer Program 12
> The team behind the popular Ray Tracing Gems 23 will be here live on
> July 28, 2022 at 10am (PDT) to 11am
> 
> Eric Haines, Adam Marrs, Peter Shirley and Ingo Wald,
> 
> Post questions - watch the discussion - ask the team anything.
> 
> -------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> Could you please talk about how ray tracing and RTX could help
> realistic sound in sound-oriented games, in the context of the
> gameplay of the original Thief game, to give a concrete example?
> Effects such as realistic reverberation, sound occlusion, the carrying
> of sound by continuous surfaces, and others are all of benefit here.
> Are there current approaches to such problems which will still allow
> ray tracing the graphics at the same time?
> 
> Here is an example of gameplay: https://youtu.be/4rWfb7ZtSPc?t=8855
> (Thief Gold | 1080p60 | Longplay Full Game Walkthrough No Commentary -
> YouTube)
> 
> -------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> Answer from Ingo Wald (iwald):
> 
> First off: “IRL” sound is important to judge directions - you can
> absolutely hear what direction something is coming from - so
> simulating that better in a game should help make this game “feel”
> more realistic, and better. On the technical side, sound transport and
> light transport are - conceptually - actually very similar; though
> there’s differences in “how” things reflect you still need frequent
> “line of sight” computations, which are exactly what ray tracing does
> - so yes, having fast ray tracing should help in making sound
> simulation better/more accurate.
> 
> Eric notes two things: VRWorks - Audio | NVIDIA Developer is from
> NVIDIA and may be just what the poster wants. For more on research in
> the area, a good place to start might be “Guided Multiview Ray Tracing
> for Fast Auralization” by Micah Taylor, Anish Chandak, Qi Mo,
> Christian Lauterbach, Carl Schissler, and Dinesh Manocha, 2012
> 
> Response from Tony Scudiero:
> 
> There’s a good history of ray tracing in audio: there are a number of
> commercial products that use ray methods for generating synthetic room
> impulse response filters. RTX technology is actually very good for
> acoustic simulations, as the material interactions of sounds are
> usually modeled at a coarser granularity than interactions of material
> and light. Acoustic simulations tend to have simple shaders, making
> their performance fundamentally a function of ray-scene queries, which
> RTX accelerates quite well!
> 
> One of the fundamental challenges of ray tracing acoustic energy is
> that the wavelengths in question are about 1 million times longer than
> visible light. Wavelengths can be on the order of a meter, which is
> the same order of magnitude as many objects. The consequence is that
> many effects must be treated over a cross-sectional area of the
> wavefront: the interaction of sound energy with a surface cannot be
> accurately modeled only at an infinitesimal point. That said, there
> has been some research on how these effects can be treated using ray
> tracing techniques. The ‘right’ approach usually depends on your
> goals: accuracy or speed.
> 
> From a technological perspective, there’s absolutely nothing standing
> in the way of writing a real-time acoustics simulation using ray
> tracing graphics APIs like DXR or VkRay to do sound propagation
> simulation in tandem with ray tracing graphics. The available
> ray-tracing power of current-generation GPUs should be able to handle
> a moderately complex acoustic simulation in tandem with graphics.
> Depending on how the graphics rendering engine is designed, primary
> rays could be used for both purposes, further economizing the
> simulation. While this is perfectly possible, I’m not aware of anyone
> that has actually done this in one of the graphics APIs.
> 
> NVIDIA’s VRWorks Audio, which is a relatively simple acoustics
> simulation intended for interactive experiences, uses OptiX. Version
> 2.0 of that SDK can make use of RTX hardware when available.
> 
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