Hi!
I've been working with sound design, music production and more recently game audio. I've been meaning to upgrade my audio interface for a while. I work with real-time audio applications that rely on spatial audio processing and throughout my work in my grad program, I've encountered problems with reaching a maximum amount of allowed 'audio voices' in Unity. The default is as some of you may already know, 32, which is customizable; however in my experience with my poor Scarlett 2i4 audio interface, I wasn't getting stable results beyond 40 audio voices. There has to be a lot of different parameters revolving around this issue; but I was wondering if the audio interface has anything to do with it? I couldn't find a minimum recommendations from Audiokinetic on audio hardware. I'm not sure if a lower jitter, or a lower latency would help with these applications at all. I know that most of it is handled in the CPU its own; but I was wondering if perhaps DSP capable audio interfaces' own CPUs (such as the UAD Apollo series as an example) assisted in this at all. I do have an i7-9770, which should be plenty; but I'm sure as some of you know, working with an increased number of audio sources in complex geometrical environments with many different audio sources playing at the same time - while also receiving real-time spatial processing (from propagation to HRTF representation etc... occlusion, air absorption and all that jazz) can be tough on the CPU on its own; which may yield to be not so feasible in actual game design scenarios.
I've been using 3D realtime authoring applications for research purposes throughout my time in school, and I intend to push the envelope on what we can get the most out of our spatial audio technologies such as Steam Audio (which I primarily work with and can't wait for the Wwise version). I was wondering if hardware had anything to do with the audio capabilities we would possess within our computers.
Kind regards,
Ege Dai