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

[Lily Bailey]

Has anyone actually benchmarked phonon-based ray tracing for audio reflections in a live UE5 versus Source 2 setup at competitive refresh rates? I’m pushing for lower latency over everything else, so I want to know where the audio CPU overhead lands compared to visual ray tracing. When you set up material absorption coefficients, are those baked per-vertex or resolved dynamically at runtime?

I’m most curious about geometric occlusion—how are you handling diffraction around corners without blowing the acoustic solver budget? Do people cache precomputed impulse responses, or is everyone running real-time phonon propagation? And how does the audio thread sit with the main render loop under heavy load? If you’ve got real frame-time numbers

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