What a bunch of absolute horse shit.

MP3 isn't slow. I was playing MP3s on a 100 Mhz 486 DX4 in 1996. Certainly a system in 2014 can handle decompressing MP3s on the fly.

Even if you didn't want to do it on the fly during game play, they easily could have been decompressed at load time and it would have taken only a couple seconds. It's not like ENTIRE 35 GB of audio needed to be loaded all at once, nobody had that RAM back then, and very few people (especially gamers) have that much now.

Let me tell you a story about playing The Settlers IV on a 233Mhz 64MB RAM Voodo 3 2000. This game was cool in that it had two audio features: a soundtrack on the CD itself, played using the CD drive's DAC [^1], and you could also drop MP3 files into a folder where the game would play those instead. It was common practice to use a NoCD crack when playing online, because the CD check took long enough you could time out of the lobby, and if you forgot the CD you got booted. That meant most online gamers had MP3 files, and no CD.

The minimum requirements to play this game were a 200MHz CPU w/ MMX and 64MB RAM - I was pretty close to this baseline. So anyway, I discovered that the game played at much better FPS (like 30 instead of 5) if you turned the music off - but only when playing MP3 - CD Audio had no hit. Now perhaps the game used a sub-par audio codec, but that single MP3 decode stream was enough to make the game unplayable.

Anyway that's not to say that I would expect MP3 decoding to be a problem in 2014, in fact you can likely play audio with no noticable increase on CPU usage, but when you have multi-stream audio (think voices, background music, sound effects from various channels - guns, explosions, etc.) I can see it starting to add up - especially when the CPU is already constrained for the graphics, game logic and perhaps of course everyone's favourite anti-piracy/anti-cheat logic.

[^1] For younger readers, yes, CD Drives used to come with built-in DACs and a special cable you could hook directly into the audio card, allowing you to listen to CD Audio on PC for "basically" free in terms of CPU cycles.

Yeah CD drives were also CD players - I had rigged my computer with a separate tiny power supply for the drive so I could have it on without the computer being on - put a disk in and it would start playing audio through the headphone port on the front and out the special wires on the back, and if you had the right audio card that would even play out the speakers with the computer off.

I've benchmarked it myself in my game. It adds a measurable amount of time to loads if you're decompressing all the audio up front to reduce latency, and during streaming it increases CPU usage. Obviously a modern machine can handle a few ogg/mp3 streams in the background during gameplay, but some games are playing dozens or hundreds of sounds at once.

"It's not like ENTIRE 35 GB of audio needed to be loaded all at once" misunderstands the nature of games fundamentally. Some games do potentially need the ability to access any of thousands of sound effects at a moment's notice with the lowest possible latency.

Plus last gen consoles have extremely slow CPUs. They were already slow when they were released.

This is likely where some of this comes from - trying to keep the PC and console versions in sync and having to do tricks like swapping space for speed.

What formats are better suited? To my knowledge most games use mp3-like compression for all their audio. Console hardware often has decompression support, it’s reasonably compact, quality/bitrate can be tuned by the sound engineers and supports a wide range of content.

It seems like on PC one would want to use Opus instead of the older MP3 or Ogg Vorbis. It has a number of performance-related improvements in addition to better audio per bitrate, although the higher-quality codec out of its two internal modes is still conceptually similar to MP3 & Co. so I figure it wouldn't necessarily solve all performance issues either.

Ok, how much uncompressed audio does need to be resident in RAM, do you think? Last gen hardware had 8GB total. I think the XBONE could only use 5GB for games. That was shared for CPU and GPU. Is it worth kicking out a lot of texture data so you don't have to stream audio?