Understanding playback limit and priority

Wwise SDK 2024.1.4

If a large number of sounds in a game are playing at the same time, the hardware might not have sufficient resources to handle all of them. To effectively manage the number of sounds that are played, you must determine how many sounds can play simultaneously and which sounds take priority.

In Wwise, there are two main properties that can help you determine which sounds are played in the game:

Playback limit: specifies the maximum number of sound instances that can be played at any one time.
Playback priority: specifies the relative importance of sound objects.

When the number of triggered sounds exceeds the playback limit, sounds are killed, starting with the lowest-priority sounds.

Additionally, you can set sounds to use virtual voice settings when the playback limit is reached. These settings include an option to continue playing sounds that exceed the limit. However, when the virtual behavior of too many sounds is set to Continue to play, performance could suffer.

These advanced playback settings are defined in Wwise Authoring by the sound designer.

For more information on these settings and their effects on playback, see Managing Priority.

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