“On a higher PC it wouldn’t be an issue. On a medium or moderate PC, it wouldn’t be an issue, it’s that on a two-core [machine] with where our min spec is, we couldn’t dedicate those resources to audio.”
It's also bullshit. Half Life 2 didn't need uncompressed audio. MP3 decompression is damn near free.
Half life also did it with half the required minimum cores, and 1 ghz less clock speed on that CPU. It released a decade before Titanfall 1. Sure sure, it's got so much more going on, but uh, that much?
For a reference of how trivial it is for CPUs to decode MP3 files, software decoders take tens of MIPS. Remember that unit? Less than a percent of one of those minimum spec CPUs required.
You know what's funny? The source engine only supports MP3 compressed audio. Do you know what titanfall 1 downloads and decompresses to to create 30gb of audio data? Lossy compressed, 160kb/s OGG format audio.
It was BS considering countless other games having no problem with sound. Decoding something like Opus takes ~30MHz of a single CPU core[1], meaning even an unreasonable situation of decoding 16 simultaneous uninterrupted 128Kbit Stereo streams would only eat half of one core.
from https://www.escapistmagazine.com/titanfall-dev-explains-the-...