Hey there, I’m doing some tests for max voice count and CPU processing load. We’re trying to determine if FMOD is a good fit for our project.
Does anyone have any numbers of how FMOD performs across different PC specs? I’ve noticed that above ~400 total voices and ~150 active voices it starts to break down and have trouble culling the right audio events.
I’m just testing this on a blank Unity project, spawning in a lot of moving 3D audio events.
If anyone has done any stress testing or knows of a better way to do I’d love to hear 
Hi,
We have some simple performance reference numbers in the Platform Details chapter of the FMOD Engine doc, but ultimately it’s difficult to make specific recommendations or predictions, as the overall performance impact will vary depending on the exact needs of, and features used by, a given project.
For example, projects making extensive use of CPU-intensive effects like convolution reverb and the pitch shifter, and/or the spectral processing tools introduced in 2.03, will have differing overhead to simpler projects that don’t make use of those tools. In general, we typically recommend against prematurely limit testing or optimizing, as tests aren’t necessarily representative of performance and voice counts during actual gameplay. If you do run into problems down the line, the Studio Profiler is an effective tool in helping to diagnose any performance issues.
As far as the testing you’ve already done by playing large amounts of events, there’s a couple of ways to ensure the right events/voices are culled while performance is also maintained:
- Increase the amount of virtual channels and real channels such that voices aren’t unnecessarily virtualized or culled
- Tweaking event instance (or bus) stealing and virtualization settings to match the desired behavior - take a look at the Virtual Voices white paper in the FMOD Engine doc for more information
- Implementing your own event instance culling system on top of FMOD’s existing virtualization system