COMPUTATION OF ROOM ACOUSTICS USING PROGRAMMABLE VIDEO HARDWARE

Abstract

This paper describes a new method of generating real time acoustics with the use of widely available graphic video cards. Algorithm that was mapped to video hardware is ray tracing. Computed echogram was later used during real time auralization. Simplified acoustic model allows to use this method in real time simulations like video games or fast acoustics approximation. Advantage of this method is ability to move source and listener during simulation without the need for long precomputation phase. Test scenes consisted of highly occluded building architectures. Results show that performing acoustic computation on GPU can significantly speed it up. Propagation of 16384 rays (at 10 reflections) for few room flat took about 32ms on AMD 2GHz with ATI Radeon 9800. Such results allow for real time simulations. Computation of above one million rays took around 1s. Described algorithm is optimized for working with ATI Radeon 9800 hardware with the use of DirectX 9 API.