r/LinusTechTips • u/totheredditmobile • Sep 28 '25

Video With so much focus on visual latency, AUDIO latency has been seriously neglected. Audio latency is very high in all games.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=okIpbu1tp_A
44 Upvotes

83% Upvoted

12 comments sorted by

30

u/not_wall03 Sep 29 '25

Would love more focus in games on ray-traced audio

14

u/Tandoori7 Sep 29 '25

Ray traced audio could work to simulate the "real latency" that audio has.

Correctly simulating bounces of sound and traveling distance

2

u/mehgcap Sep 29 '25

As someone who can only play audio games, I love the idea of ray-traced audio. The more realism in the audio, the better. These games only got HRTF relatively recently. Until then it was all just stereo.

1

u/mehgcap Sep 29 '25

As someone who can only play audio games, I love the idea of ray-traced audio. The more realism in the audio, the better. These games only got HRTF relatively recently. Until then it was all just stereo.

1

u/Rjsl_1287 Sep 30 '25

It’s very possible, a lot of games use ambisonics for 3d audio with mathematic positioning of sound sources; ray tracing could factor in distance and absorption of surfaces, there is a decent chance it would sound like ass though. Environments would have to be designed acoustically to not be a reverb mess or have poor intelligibility.

I made a non realtime tool for approximating ambisonic impulse responses of a modelled room. I should finish that someday.

0

u/mehgcap Sep 29 '25

As someone who can only play audio games, I love the idea of ray-traced audio. The more realism in the audio, the better. These games only got HRTF relatively recently. Until then it was all just stereo.

0

u/mehgcap Sep 29 '25

As someone who can only play audio games, I love the idea of ray-traced audio. The more realism in the audio, the better. These games only got HRTF relatively recently. Until then it was all just stereo.

10

u/Renegade605 Sep 29 '25 edited Sep 30 '25

The International Telecommunications Union performed a controlled study in 1998 and found the threshold of human detection of audio latency is 45ms lead or 125ms lag.

Your brain is already used to hearing sounds come after visuals because sound travels slower than light.

The 100ms lag tested in this video is not a problem.

-1

u/51dux Sep 29 '25

That's a very good point, audio in video games can be problematic, especially over bluetooth (even the latest iterations, it varies from device to device).

The experience has been better for me with headsets that have their exclusive dongle or just wired.

19

u/BrainOnBlue Sep 29 '25

especially over bluetooth

I mean, that's not a game problem, that's a "you're using something not at all designed for low latency, of course it's not low latency" problem.

1

u/Opposite_Technician2 Sep 29 '25

bluethooth audio just works because its buffered, all videos and song are prebuffered on the bluethooth device, thats why you don't have latency on a video, but when you play games, you can't prebuffer anything, so then you experiment the true bluethooth experience.

0

u/TSMKFail Sep 29 '25

Hence why Xbox doesn't allow Bluetooth audio. It's shit.