During its GPU 14 event held at the volcanic island of Hawaii, AMD has unveiled a second out of four "pilllars" that the new lineup is based on, the AMD TrueAudio technology. Only supported on three graphics cards in the new lineup, AMD TrueAudio technology is a fully programmable audio engine that will, according to AMD, revolutionize gaming audio.
According to what we were able to see and somewhat even hear during last night conference, is that TrueAudio should give game developer more flexibility to tweak and tune audio to a whole new level by providing more audio channels than the conventional audio engines at an increased accuracy. It basically offers directional audio over any output including stereo, 5.1 or 7.1.
Unfortunately, only three newly announced graphics cards will carry the AMD TrueAudio technology badge including AMD Radeon R9 290X, R9 290 and the R7 260X. It is most likely that these three feature GPUs based on the new GCN 2.0 architecture while the rest of the announced lineup are mere tweaked rebrands from the HD 7000 series.
AMD managed to get quite a few companies to join including GenAudio which held quite an interesting presentation of the Astounsound for gaming, a 3D spatial audio technology that should dramatically improve the gaming experience, Eidos, which showed the result in its upcoming Thief game which uses "convultion reverb" that was previously heavy on the CPU and had a big memory footprint as well as some other companies like Creative Assembly, Airtight Games, McDSP, Xaviant, Audiokinetic and more.
Source:
AMD.com.