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VRWorks - Audio


VRWorks Audio brings truly immersive audio to applications by pathtracing sound in 3D space in real time.

Hardware:Compatible with: Maxwell, Pascal and Turing based GPUs. (GeForce GTX 900 series and higher, Quadro M5000 and higher)
Note: (RTCore acceleration requires RTX capable GPUs)
Software:64 bit Windows.
Plugin for Unreal Engine


NVIDIA Technical Blogs



The demand for realism increases dramatically the instant a player puts on a Head-Mounted Display (HMD) - images, sounds, and interactions make or break the immersiveness of the experience. For example, audio in a small room will sound different than the same audio outdoors because of the reflections caused by sound bouncing off the walls of the room.

Leveraging NVIDIA OptiX ray tracing technology, VRWorks Audio traces the path of sound in real-time, delivering physically realistic audio that conveys the size, shape, and material properties of the virtual environment you are in.

Propagation



How Sound Moves in Space

Path Traced Audio



Modeling Propagation


Key Features

Real-time modeling of the following effects:

  • Sound propagation, direct and indirect paths
  • Occlusion for direct and indirect paths
  • Directionality/HRTF (Head Related Transfer Function)
  • Attenuation
  • Approximate direct path diffraction
  • Material reflection, absorption, & transmission

Improvements in VRWorks Audio 2.0

  • Support for Nvidia Turing GPUs
  • Support for new OptiX version 6.0
  • Faster trace times with RTX (RTCore) acceleration
  • New quality and performance presets for professional use-cases

NVIDIA VRWorks Audio is a fully GPU accelerated and path-traced audio solution that creates a complete acoustic image of the environment in real-time without requiring any precomputed filters.

As the scene is loaded by the application, the acoustic model is built and updated on-the-fly; audio effect filters are generated and applied in real time on the sound source waveforms. This approach gives tremendous flexibility to the audio designers and engineers, allowing them to design soundscapes interactively.

NVIDIA VRWorks Audio Pipeline

  1. Scene information is loaded

  2. Simulation is performed (using geometry, source locations and material properties)

  3. Audio filters are generated

  4. Audio filters are applied on the source "Dry" audio

  5. "Wet" audio (with VRWorks filters applied) is output to the application

NVIDIA VRWorks Audio SDK

NVIDIA VRWorks Audio SDK consists of a library, a set of APIs, sample applications and documentation designed for application developers who wish to have immersive audio in their applications. All APIs are designed as standard C-APIs.


Download VRWorks Audio SDK

NVIDIA VRWorks Audio for Unreal Engine 4

VRWorks Audio is also avaialable as an Unreal Engine 4.15 game engine plugin which makes using this technology in UE4 based games and experiences simple. Plugins for other game and audio platforms are forthcoming.


In order to access the UE4 GameWorks integrations, you will need a UE4 / GitHub subscription.


GitHub

Resources