gamedevlists-general

[GD-General] Audio latency

[Brian H. <ho...@bo...>]

I'm curious, how much latency do you guys accept from your audio 
subsystems?  With the amount of layering that occurs, e.g. software 
application mixing which in turn might go into an API mixing system 
which in turn goes to a hardware mixer, I can see latencies going up 
to the hundreds of milliseconds.

With my old audio stuff I could crank my buffer up to 500ms, and that 
was very...bad...feeling.

For a beat matching game it would seem that you'd need extremely low 
latency, right up there with that of professional audio software 
(8-16ms or less). 

Thoughts?

Re: [GD-General] Audio latency

[Javier A. <ja...@py...>]

Brian Hook wrote:

> For a beat matching game it would seem that you'd need extremely low
> latency, right up there with that of professional audio software
> (8-16ms or less).

Input is inherently laggy, so the measure of professional sound equipment is
not really applicable. For most users, I think a latency of 75-100ms between
input and sound is very acceptable. Those with a trained ear, and those
looking for it, will probably notice up to 40-50ms. Those are the ballpark
figures I'd start with.

-- 
  Javier Arevalo
  Pyro Studios