well that's embarassing (Gaming)

by uberfoop , Seattle-ish, Sunday, June 22, 2014, 13:02 (3807 days ago) @ scarab

I wish you (or someone from Bungie) could have told me that every time I asked for it.

Can't say I ever noticed it happening; are there some good examples that you could mention?

Good examples?

That inside of that pipe on High Ground has a filter that has a very obvious echo on bangy sounds like gunshots.

The shower area with the pro pipe spawn on Powerhouse makes reloads sound very raspy compared with reloads outside.

Halo's 1 and 2 have some very noticeable filtering, but the most striking sound environment transition that comes immediately to mind is when you enter the banshee pillar on AotCR/TB. Here you go, also threw in the same thing in CEA:

AotCR/TB are completely loaded with noticeable area filters, though. The control room itself has an extremely aggressive filter which, though it suffers a little clipping, makes the start of the opening cutscene of Two Betrayals sound amazing.

How are the filters applied? Is it something done by the CPU, GPU, sound card, digital processor chip on the mother board? Maybe PS4 does it differently than xboxes and Bungie hasn't got it working properly yet.

The original Xbox had a sound chip, but I don't know what all it was capable of and whether area reverb effects and such would have been offloaded to it.

For the PS360, it sounds like audio processing is usually a CPU thing. Those consoles have no dedicated audio processing hardware, but their CPUs feature tremendous capacity for patterned parallel computation; PS3's CELL in particular is actually theoretically significantly better at it than the CPUs in PS4 and Xbox One.

As for PS4 and XB1, I have no idea. You could probably do some half-decent audio work on those CPUs. Those consoles also *supposedly* have some dedicated audio processing silicone, but nobody seems to be sure of what it is and what it's for.