#43 Real-Time 3D Finite-Difference Time-Domain Simulation of Low- and Mid-Frequency Room Acoustics

Modern graphics processing units (GPUs) are massively parallel computing environments. They make it possible to run certain tasks orders of magnitude faster than what is possible with a central processing unit (CPU). One such case is simulation of room acoustics with wave-based modeling techniques. In this paper we show that it is possible to run room acoustic simulations with a finite-difference time-domain model in real-time for a modest-size geometry up to 7kHz sampling rate. For a 10% maximum dispersion error limit this means that our system can be used for real-time auralization up to 1.5kHz. In addition, the system is able to handle several simultaneous sound sources and a moving listener with no additional cost. The results of this study include performance comparison of different schemes showing that the interpolated wideband scheme is able to handle in real-time 1.4 times the bandwidth of the standard rectilinear scheme with the same maximum dispersion error.