AMD Trueaudio

severe rabies · 4 Sep 2014 at 22:57

I'm slightly confused with trueaudio, what do I have to do to get it to work? what actually uses it?

I'm currently using a pair of sennheiser momentums and they plug directly into my PC, my gpu is connected to my monitor via hdmi, so would I have to plug my headphones into my monitor or my PC. If it is my PC, would it matter if I plug it in from the front or the back, or will I get the same audio quality from say plugging it in from the back?

I know the GPU's that support it have a dedicated chip for sound processing, so would that affect other things that aren't coded to run true aduio, like youtube videos for example?

PC info
motherboard = Asus Sabertooth 990fx
cpu = phenom 1090t
gpu = r9 290

rids57 · 4 Sep 2014 at 23:16

The Trueaudio hardware is actually built into the GPU itself and uses the bandwidth and processing power of the chip to create the audio stream. That audio stream is then passed to the operating system's audio drivers, whether that be motherboard, sound card or USB, it doesn't matter because the positional cues are already included.

As long as the game supports it and it's turned on in the game settings then you should be getting Trueaudio through your headphones.

If you're expecting a Trueaudio stream, make sure that you are listening in plain stereo, otherwise it will mess up the cues.

Marsman · 4 Sep 2014 at 23:23

Edit: Beaten to it!

Gimpymoo · 5 Sep 2014 at 10:34

Surely the days of proprietary audio guff in games is over?

Creative nested in that coop for way too long.

Uriel · 5 Sep 2014 at 11:11

You need to be running a game that supports TruAudio for it to do anything. That's currently: Murdered: Soul Suspect, Star Citizen, Thief and Lichdom: Battlemage according to Wikipedia.

I dislike hardware specific proprietary audio game APIs in principle. However, practically no games do in software what an X-Fi was capable of nine years ago, when using DirectSound3D or OpenAL (disregarding the proprietary EAX). It's depressing that we've barely moved on in 9 years but this was largely down to Microsoft killing off DirectSound3D. I'd love another ubiquitous 'platform agnostic' sound API that will allow game audio to be fully handled in hardware. If that happened we might see some progress again.