Sound Propagation Physics: Doppler Effect and Distance Attenuation Curves: Competitive Benchmark Analysis and Matériel Interactions

[Dean Davis]

What’s everyone’s take on how games actually model sound attenuation these days? I’ve been benchmarking Doppler shift behavior and distance attenuation curves across a few titles, and the inverse square law is clearly getting fudged—some engines apply a hard rolloff past a certain radius while others keep low-frequency absorption curves active way further out. Where are you folks seeing the most consistent frametime behavior when the Doppler effect kicks in during fast-moving gameplay? I’ve noticed spikes when multiple moving sources stack up, and I’m trying to figure out if that’s the spatial audio CPU thread or just poorly optimized occlusion queries.

On the hardware side, how are you seeing sound engine scaling across cores? I’ve been testing on a high-end rig and the atmospheric absorption calculations seem to bottleneck on single-threaded audio processing while the GPU sits idle. Is anyone running specialized audio hardware or just pushing it through the main DSP, and does that change your frametime consistency in competitive scenarios? Curious whether anyone’s measured actual latency differences between software-based propagation math versus hardware-accelerated spatial audio.

"[Case: FormD T1 9.95L] • [CPU: Ryzen 5 7600X] • [GPU: RTX 4070 Super]"

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