News Sony talks PS5 as Microsoft launches Xbox One S All-Digital Edition

I wonder if this would be something like what AMD tried to do with TrueAudio. Come to think of it, would the TrueAudio Next calculations, which are done on the GPU, be vaguely similar to ray tracing?

 

You can broadly split 'game audio processing' into broadly three categories:
1) Environmental audio. There are plenty of APIs for this available from multiple vendors, some using path tracing and some using other methods. These are what deal with things like 'reverb', moving sources, selective frequency absorption, etc.
2) 'Generic' HRTFs. These are mostly static (some modify based on head orientation, particularly for VR use) functions that are precomputed to model the effect on incoming sound by the head, shoulders and upper torso, and the very outer pinnae. This is the main source of 'spatialisation'. This is the portion that would be omitted when mixing for multi-channel speakers.
3) 'Tuned' HRTFs. Effectively nonexistant for PC gaming, and requires either a good 3D scan of the outer (and inner, for IEM-based systems) ears, or hours of arbitrary function-twiddling to try and vaguely approximate the effect manually.

2) Is so computationally easy it's been standard for motherboard on-board audio for decades (for the fixed-head-orientation case). 1) Generally received less attention as even a basic solution is 'good enough' for on-screen gaming. Better solutions are needed for VR, but none so far have really needed any sort of dedicated acceleration (i.e. the performance impact is low enough that a 50% relative performance boost would be a tiny absolute performance gain).

From the description of the PS5 so far, an 8-core CPU swings the pendulum from GPU-limited back to CPU-limited for this console generation (7th gen: GPU bottlenecked, 8th gen CPU bottlenecked) so I can't see much need for GPGPU audio offload. Even for VR where better audio spatialisation actually has perceptual results you'd rather be using the CPU for that and leave the GPU for the video heavy lifting.

 

So the new Xbone is a more expensive unit, requires a constant online connection to have any useful function, cannot accept discs, comes with 120GB-ish of the 1TB used up and will soon be rendered obsolete by the Xbox Mk4.

Makes me think of the PSP Go from back in the day, although the market is very different to a decade ago, it still strikes me as a dead rubber since the standard Xbone S cost the same or less and has superior features by dint of having a disc drive and everything else the new one has too.

 

I want to know how to get an XBox 1 Analog Edition. Has a nice composite video port on the back, stereo RCA audio, and loads games off a compact cassette.
...
Okay, I totally don't want the compact cassette drive. I lied. Besides, software on a compact cassette is still digital.
I'm just sick of "digital" being used where people mean "online" and I wanted to make fun of Microsoft's marketing department.