Ray-Traced Audio Reflections and Environmental Acoustic Diffraction in UE5 / Source 2: Advanced Implementation and Real-World Architecture

[Tyler Nelson]

I’ve been digging into ray-traced audio reflections in UE5 and Source 2, specifically the phonon tracing and geometric occlusion side of things, and I’m curious how you’re all handling material absorption coefficients without tanking frame times. When you’re building occlusion models for competitive maps where spatial audio actually matters for footstep定位, are you baking the acoustic data offline or running it live through the raytracing pipeline? I’ve seen some approaches that approximate diffraction with precomputed impulse responses, but I keep running into latency issues mid-match that ruin the positional cues.

For anyone who’s actually benchmarked this at the engine level—what’s the real CPU/GPU overhead you’re seeing when you enable environmental acoustic diffraction on top of a competitive 240Hz setup? Are you using HRTF convolution, and if so, how are you managing the memory footprint across different room materials? I’m particularly interested in whether you’re doing per-trace material queries or grouping materials into acoustic clusters to reduce the compute cost. Anybody running this in production, what’s your sweet spot between accuracy and performance?

"Moondrop Blessing 3 IEMs + Apple USB-C Dongle (Clean 0.1 ohm output impedance)"

[Author]

Posts