We will be updating 2100 with a patch soon to address some issues that have been experienced.
What will be included:
-Door opening into space at the back of the station will be fixed
-We will look into making text appear on the screen when given instructions. This should make it easier to follow what is been said. We have decided it will be better to make the text appear when given codes for doors, otherwise the screen will have too much text on it.
-Light will be on all keypads so you can see what numbers you are entering
We've just released Steam® Audio 2.0-beta.17, which includes several new features, including support for real-time indirect sound simulation using AMD Radeon™ Rays. Previously, Radeon™ Rays was supported only for baking. With this release, Radeon™ Rays and AMD TrueAudio Next can be combined to perform indirect sound simulation and rendering on the GPU without interfering with graphics or general GPU compute. This blog post discusses how this works.
Previously, on Steam® Audio...
Over the last few releases, we have added features to the Steam® Audio that enable the GPU to be used in different ways for accelerating spatial audio computations.
In 2.0-beta.13, we added support for TrueAudio Next. This feature uses the Resource Reservation capability of supported AMD GPUs to carve out a portion of the GPU (called a "reserved queue") dedicated to audio convolution processing. This allows the GPU to be used for significantly speeding up spatial audio rendering, while ensuring that audio and graphics do not interfere with each other. The result is stable graphics frame rates, and fast, glitch-free audio processing.
Figure: Impact on GPU rendering performance when reserving 4 CUs for TrueAudio Next processing. The plots show the average FPS observed on various GPU benchmarks when run at the same time as a TAN benchmark using Steam®® Audio. Measurements obtained using a Radeon™ RX 480 GPU with 4 reserved CUs, 256 total convolution channels and 1.3s IRs. All values are shown as a percentage of a baseline that is obtained when the TAN benchmark is not running. For example, reserving 10% of the available CUs reduces the average FPS in the Timespy benchmark by about 10%.
In 2.0-beta.15, we added support for Radeon™ Rays. This feature runs on any GPU supporting OpenCL 1.2 or later, and uses the GPU to accelerate indirect sound simulation (ray tracing and related processing). Since the reserved queue was used by TrueAudio Next, Radeon™ Rays would run on the remainder of the GPU, along with graphics and general compute. If used for real-time simulation, it would therefore interfere with graphics frame rates, which is why this feature was restricted to baking only.
What's new?
Starting with AMD Radeon™ Software Adrenalin 2019 Edition v19.2.1, AMD GPUs support up to two reserved queues. In other words, the GPU compute units can be divided into three sets: 2 reserved queues, and 1 general queue. This feature (called "Dual RTQ") only requires a driver update.
In 2.0-beta.17, Steam® Audio runs Radeon™ Rays on the second reserved queue, thereby isolating indirect sound simulation from graphics as well. This way simulation (using Radeon™ Rays), convolution (using TrueAudio Next), and graphics can all be run on the same GPU without interfering with each other. This results in stable frame rates, glitch-free audio processing, and low-latency indirect sound simulation.
How Dual RTQ works
As an example, consider a Radeon™ RX Vega 64, which contains 64 Compute Units (CUs). A maximum of 16 CUs (25% of the GPU) can be used in all reserved queues combined. One way to partition this would be:
First reserved queue, 4 CUs. Used by TrueAudio Next.
Second reserved queue, 8 CUs. Used by Radeon™ Rays.
Remainder of the GPU, 52 CUs. Used for graphics and general compute.
This can be set up using the Steam® Audio Unity Plugin as follows. Begin by attaching a Steam® Audio Custom Settings component to the Steam® Audio Manager Settings GameObject. Then in the Inspector tab, configure it as follows:
Set Max Compute Units To Reserve to 12. This is the total number of CUs used in both reserved queues combined (4 for TrueAudio Next + 8 for Radeon™ Rays).
Set Fraction Compute Units for IR Update to 0.67 (approximately 2/3). This is the fraction of reserved CUs to be used for Radeon™ Rays. (0.67 * 12 total reserved CUs = 8 CUs for Radeon™ Rays).
The remaining 52 CUs will be used for graphics and general compute.
Performance
Below are representative speedup numbers for various simulation scenarios with varying numbers of CUs reserved for Radeon™ Rays. All measurements were obtained on an Intel® Core i7 5930K (Haswell E) CPU, along with an AMD Radeon™ RX Vega 64 GPU, running Windows 10 64-bit and AMD Radeon™ Software Adrenalin 2019 Edition v19.2.1.
Rays / Bounces / Sources
Time (4 CUs)
Time (8 CUs)
Time (16 CUs)
Speedup 4 -> 8
Speedup 8 -> 16
8192 / 8 / 4
24.8
16.4
13.2
1.5
1.2
8192 / 8 / 16
67.9
44.3
32.3
1.5
1.4
8192 / 32 / 4
74.5
45.7
34.1
1.6
1.3
8192 / 32 / 16
202.1
115.7
74.2
1.7
1.6
32768 / 8 / 4
62.1
35.8
22.9
1.7
1.6
32768 / 8 / 16
184.6
102.7
62.3
1.8
1.6
32768 / 32 / 4
233.7
126.1
74.1
1.9
1.7
32768 / 32 / 16
687.8
361.5
198.6
1.9
1.8
Table: All of the above numbers correspond to an IR duration of 2.0 seconds, and 1st order Ambisonics. All times are in milliseconds.
Based on the above numbers, 4 CUs are sufficient to simulate 4 sources with 8k rays and 32 bounces at a 10 Hz update rate. With 8 CUs, a ~10 Hz update rate can be achieved with 16 sources, 32k rays, and 8 bounces. Also, as the number of CUs dedicated to Radeon™ Rays is increased, the speedups increase roughly linearly, especially when the amount of simulation work is high (many rays, many bounces, and/or many sources).
Learn More at GDC!
Interested in learning more about how Steam® Audio uses TrueAudio Next and Radeon™ Rays to accelerate spatial audio on GPUs? Join us at GDC 2019, where we'll talk about Steam® Audio, TrueAudio Next, Resource Reservation on AMD GPUs, and more!
Session: Powering Spatial Audio on GPUs Through Hardware, Software, and Tools (Presented by AMD) Track: Audio Date/Time: Wed, Mar 20, 12:30pm
The most successful beta testing experience we ever had, inspired a whole new game and we have a release date now. Introducing Zoot as a currency, you can buy all sorts of new items on MatchyMart and customize your gaming experience away - MatchyGotchy Z is almost here!
☆ MatchyGotchy Z ☆ is a brand new game coming soon to Early Access. We decided to include the community in the on-going development process this time around, and it is because of your kindness and support that the Matchyverse 🚀 continues to grow :)
The most successful beta testing experience we ever had, inspired a whole new game and we have a release date now. Introducing Zoot as a currency, you can buy all sorts of new items on MatchyMart and customize your gaming experience away - MatchyGotchy Z is almost here!
☆ MatchyGotchy Z ☆ is a brand new game coming soon to Early Access. We decided to include the community in the on-going development process this time around, and it is because of your kindness and support that the Matchyverse 🚀 continues to grow :)
The most successful beta testing experience we ever had, inspired a whole new game and we have a release date now. Introducing Zoot as a currency, you can buy all sorts of new items on MatchyMart and customize your gaming experience away - MatchyGotchy Z is almost here!
☆ MatchyGotchy Z ☆ is a brand new game coming soon to Early Access. We decided to include the community in the on-going development process this time around, and it is because of your kindness and support that the Matchyverse 🚀 continues to grow :)
The most successful beta testing experience we ever had, inspired a whole new game and we have a release date now. Introducing Zoot as a currency, you can buy all sorts of new items on MatchyMart and customize your gaming experience away - MatchyGotchy Z is almost here!
☆ MatchyGotchy Z ☆ is a brand new game coming soon to Early Access. We decided to include the community in the on-going development process this time around, and it is because of your kindness and support that the Matchyverse 🚀 continues to grow :)
First, a big thank you to everyone who submitted an image for the event. The original plan was to do a vote, but honestly we loved the submissions so much that we decided that everyone is a winner here. These six submissions have all earned their PixARK key to give to a friend. Congratulations!
Indominusvoids sent us this lovely heart shaped house. A valentines gift you could live in!
Zoe snapped a photo of their prideful heart with their phone!
Lem sent us this painfully punny photo, with more hearts than we can handle!
GonexX used lava and fireworks to great effect! Love 4ever indeed.
And finally Helena created their heart using the magic glow of magic stones.
Thank you again to everyone who submitted. Keys will be sent as a reply to your submissions shortly after this post goes live.
