What is AMD True Audio Next? How to use? Enhancement and Features

Audio Technology in a PC System is equally important as the graphics that you would want on your system. It should be agreed that the audio technology has not advanced at the rate that the graphics department has been able to. This has been because of the 2D screen that we have been involved for long. The 2D display does not give much of an impetus to the 3D sound, though there have been a few gaming developers have come up with a bit of 3DbAudio mix. To address the gap between the video and audio, more so in the present context of VR and 4K video technology, AMD has recently come up with a new Kit for audio enrichment. AMD’s True Audio Next or TAN is set to revolutionize the audio enhancement to the next level.

What is AMD True Audio Next?

To put it just, True Audio next is a software development kit (SDK) for GPU and is aimed at accelerating the audio signal processing. The technology has been developed as part of the LiquidVR technology from AMD.

It is set to be providing an immersive and comfortable kind of VR experience. The open source physics based acoustic rendering technique. It offers the parallel processing power of the AMD GPUs.

What Is The Significance of The Technology?

In fact, as we said before – the audio advancement was not necessary for the kind of personal computing we have been into so far. Most of the systems used the surround sound technology that could handle most of the tasks.

The advent of VR technology has necessitated the need for an immersive audio experience. The Immersive experience that comes as much close to what we feel in the real world has been the vital aspect of Virtual Reality. In fact, it has also been claimed that the audio plays more than half of what you call a VR immersive feel. If the audio profile does not match the environment, it would somehow break the immersion.

NVidia has recently launched VR Works Audio which is a physics-based audio enhancement technology. It makes use of ray tracing and thus produces accurate physics. AMD’s True Audio Next is the answer to VR Works Audio, in a way. It uses the same technology as in the former. It uses the AMD Radeon‘s ray tracing to provide you a real-time physics-based audio rendering that tends to be dynamic.

AMD True Audio Next also renders it possible to make the environmental sound closer to the real world acoustics. It makes use of an excellent Auralisation possible.

The Features

It is still a relatively new offering from AMD, and we may need time to evaluate the features that the technology comes with. Even then, here are a few features that would make it worth the consideration.

• It provides CPU and GPU implementations for all the functions within.
• TAN offers you an extendable open source API.
• It offers you a multi-threaded, multi-queue and real-time audio engine.
• The OpenCL parallel batch convolution engine ensures faster performance.
• It enables a fully real-time dynamic physics-based acoustics rendering.

What Are The Benefits That AMD True Audio Next Offer You?

The True Audio Next Software Development Kit offers you areal time audio enhancement and thus aids in Co-existential performance with graphics. The accelerated VR Audio goes a long way in making use of GPU for the audio and thus frees the CPU resources.

True Audio Next also enables advanced interactive acoustics. Freed up CPU bandwidth can be helpful in the game physics and AI thus further enhancing your gaming experience and a genuine VR feeling.

Realistic Audio is significant in any Virtual Reality based environment. Audio assumes an important role when you are in a VR environment. Unlike when your head is stationary, the VR would expect you to move your head in any direction and this needs to be accompanied by the physics-based sound model. AMD TAN makes it possible.

System Requirements For True Audio Next

Here are the system requirements that you need to have to go for the optimum use of True Audio Next-

• AMD Radeon Software version 16.7.3 or above
• Microsoft Windows 7, 8.1 or 10
• AMD AMF Library version 1.3.0.5 or above
• AMD cIFFT Library
• AMD APP SDK version 3.0 or above

The Future Ahead For AMD True Audio Next

Well, AMD has been a pioneer in many areas of the computing world. Though modeled on the similar offering from NVidia, we would expect it to grow further. Given the fact that many systems have been equipped with AMD GPUs, you can expect the developers to configure their offerings to work with True Audio Next.

Phonon, for instance, is an audio enhancement software which is available for the sound designers. This tool lets the sound designers add physics-based environmental audio to games and VR apps. It works with the True Audio Next API if you are using a device with AMD CPU in it. Phonon will automatically switch to AMD True Audio Next and thus will begin to model additional sounds physically. If you have a non-supported system, rendering will be effected using the traditional mode of rendering sound.

In Conclusion

Well, we guess we have made the essence of what True Audio Next is capable of offering you. Please note that we have not attempted to provide you technical know-how of the system and the technology. Those details should be primarily aimed at the VR game developers. Our aim while compiling this information has been to let the general user be aware of what the new API holds for the audio enthusiast.

How would we find it developing further? Well, VR is growing, and we can expect it is reaching higher standards quite soon. From our point of view, it is quite heartening to see the audio technology getting enhanced, even when it had been stagnated for quite a long time. AMD’s True Audio Next is an excellent step in that direction, and we would expect it to be a success.