Spatial Audio Processing Overhead on Multi-Core CPUs and Dedicated DSPs: Historical Paradigm Evolution and Next-Gen Architectural Projections

[Maya Perez]

I’ve been benchmarking spatial audio pipelines for competitive FPS titles and hitting a real wall with convolution reverb CPU costs. When you’re pushing 240Hz and every millisecond of scheduler jitter counts, how are you routing floating-point convolution workloads across multiple cores without blowing your frame budget? I’m seeing thread scheduling latency spike when reverb engines preempt the render thread—has anyone found a clean way to isolate DSP threads via CPU affinity masks or real-time scheduling policies without introducing glitches?

On the hardware side, I’ve read that dedicated audio DSPs used to offload convolution entirely, but many modern engines now run everything on the main CPU. Is that a genuine shift toward software convolution with FFT optimization, or did hardware DSPs just get eclipsed by faster cores? For legacy setups still grinding through early reverb algorithms, what’s the

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[Alex Bell]

Great topic. The paradigm really shifted from dedicated DSP silicon to CPU-based processing over the last couple of gens

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