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WeeklyMeat t1_j1o9wrm wrote

Reply to comment by ReekyRumpFedRatsbane in I am not an audiophile, so I wonder if I'm in the wrong here. by PraviPero

I agree, except for the "a lot of game audio is fairly heavily compressed". That was the case like 10 years ago. Most games today have uncompressed audio.

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ReekyRumpFedRatsbane t1_j1pckv0 wrote

That makes sense. Although, there is one "current" game in which you can clearly hear the compression: GTA 5 / Online, but that came out 9 years ago of course, so it's no surprise it is no longer "current" on a technical level.

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klogg4 t1_j1pehx2 wrote

Half-Life 2 only has music being compressed to MP3, otherwise WAV 16/22.05 or 16/44.1 Mono/Stereo. I believe sounds in most games are uncompressed actually. Even if it's an older game, it's likely to have lower sampling rate for its samples (16/22.05 or 8/22.05 for example), but still they're often true PCM.

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ali-b912 t1_j1qb15d wrote

Compression isn't necessarily the problem. 16/22.05 WAV is going to sound alot worse then 320kbps MP3's; let alone 8/22.05

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klogg4 t1_j1qcer6 wrote

Absolutely agree with you (not for 8 bits though), but the thing is - these things do not have any compression artifacts, they are just highpassed hard way.

Also interesting thing is how game engines handle all the sounds. I have checked Half-Life 2 after I wrote a post, and was impressed that a lot of sounds there were 16/22.05. I have never payed attention to this in game. Maybe it's a resampling without high-pass filter (the ladder - of course it WILL make artifacts), maybe it's the reverb that worked marvelously in HL2, but still.

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ali-b912 t1_j1qfyut wrote

Tbf, you aren't going to hear a lot of the 11khz+ on speech, and most of the music in HL2 is electronic and kinda centered in the low/mid range (and lower volume). It's definitely noticeable I think on weapon sounds, but noticeably better then HL1.

In terms of games generally, you have to think about the fact that while compressed files are smaller, having to decompress is more math on top of the game for the CPU to do. If it can dump it in memory and stream from there it's fine, but in some consoles that wasn't easily doable. The other factor is physical media; generally CD's or DVD's back then. It was a trade off for developers. Less so now, where discs are just tokens to enable an online download.

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klogg4 t1_j1qh64m wrote

Speech is definitely 44.1 khz there, and music is MP3 (I don't remember what exact quality though). I was talking about sounds like Combine talk, zombies, headcrabs, etc - I was surprised to know that they're 22.05 khz.

>In terms of games generally, you have to think about the fact that while compressed files are smaller, having to decompress is more math on top of the game for the CPU to do.

Yeah, correct. That's why there aren't really any compressed files in any game - back then it was a bad idea because of CPU overhead, now it's a useless idea because it's not much of a disk space comparing to all the other resources.

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DasGutYa t1_j1q6d1b wrote

Pretty much all ubisoft games have god awful compressions, most noticeably the far cry games.

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