Do you remember AMD's TrueAudio Next technology? If not, you'd be forgiven; it's not gained as much traction as it could (should?) have, considering its open nature. As a quick reminder, this is AMD's GPU-accelerated audio pipeline, which adds "audio raytracing" capabilities to audio by delivering true spatial positioning and object interactions in a given scene - at much higher performance than the usual CPU-based solutions.

The 1.2 version is being hailed as a "coming of age" for True Audio Next, which includes "a number of notable performance and feature improvements, and it reflects the enhancements built into the version of TAN supported in Steam Audio." Efficiency has also been improved, with minimized "memory, buffer transfer and synchronization overhead". The remainder of the blog post by AMD's Fellow Design Engineer Carl Wakeland follows.

"The TAN GPU utilities library now supports AMD Resource Reservation, in which a configurable part of the GPU may be reserved for audio processing apart from the normal GPU compute resources. As explained in earlier blogs, Resource Reservation protects audio and graphics queues and compute resources from blocking each other, allowing them to coexist on the GPU as never before possible. Developers can now call a function to query a system's TAN support and available resources, as well.

Finally, a number of new samples are added to exemplify and streamline the process of building audio applications using TAN:

  • Accelerated mixing. Mixing on the GPU with TAN can minimize buffer transfer overhead.
  • 10-band EQ.
  • IIR (Infinite Impulse Response) filter.
  • Time domain convolution and doppler sample.

We continue to work on exciting new optimizations for future releases. Meanwhile, we welcome contributions from others - please feel free to make a pull request to submit your own examples and optimizations for TAN."