GDC 2025 Session Viewer

The current generation of GPUs and consoles have provided us with a new opportunity - hardware accelerated raytracing. While this is already widely used for rendering, there is a vast untapped potential in leveraging this technology for audio. We have explored this by implementing a new sound propagation system in Snowdrop, showcased in Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora and Star Wars: Outlaws, and would like to share our learnings and findings to encourage experimenting with using raytracing beyond its graphics applications in your own engine.

The talk will introduce the concept of audio raytracing in Snowdrop and give details about its implementation through the raytracing query system. It will also present how it is used for simulating sound propagation in our games and share some performance results.

Takeaway

Attendees will learn how they can implement and experiment with GPU raytracing for audio or other uses in their engines, with practical examples and learnings from two released AAA games, including some performance and latency considerations.

Intended Audience

The talk is aimed at graphics and audio programmers, as well as other programmers who would like to experiment with using GPU raytracing for applications other than rendering. While a basic understanding of audio and graphics programming is useful, the talk is approachable to anyone with general programming knowledge.