Table of Contents
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Lessons
At some point while optimizing, you will most likely end up exceeding your resource budget while testing the limitations of your system. When running out of resources, you will often receive starvation errors, and these indicate that you should either reduce the resource usage or allocate more.
There are usually two types of starvation errors:
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Voice Starvation: Indicates that your audio buffer was not processed in time. In other words, your CPU simply isn’t fast enough to handle all audio within its time frame, therefore the audio might glitch or misbehave.
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Source Starvation: Indicates that you have too low of a streaming bandwidth for what’s needed to be streamed.
Both of these types of errors are indications of too much pressure on the system. Picture a tunnel of water, where the water is the audio from your game during runtime. When there’s too much pressure on the system, Wwise will inform you of this using voice or source starvation errors. These errors are rarely caused by a single problem, rather there’s a collective overload problem. Your job is then to use the Profiler to investigate what elements are the biggest burden on the performance, and selectively limit or reduce the resource usage on less essential elements. Only you and your team can make decisions on which elements are nice-to-have or too important to lose; optimizations are always a matter of priority.