Reducing Lag Spikes in Sound Physics Remastered by Tuning Sound Calculations

guide

Sound Physics Remastered calculates reverberation and occlusion for sounds as they play, and those calculations are the usual cause of lag spikes. The Sound Physics Settings screen exposes every value that controls how much work each calculation performs. Lowering ray counts, bounce counts, and update frequency reduces the cost per sound; the trade-off is less consistent or less detailed reverb and occlusion.

Ray Count and Bounces

Environment evaluation ray count sets how many rays are traced to work out reverberation for each sound source. More rays give more consistent tracing results, but each one costs calculation time. If sounds cause lag spikes, decrease this value.

Environment evaluation ray bounces sets how many times those rays bounce. More bounces produce more echo and sound ducting, again at a higher calculation cost. Decrease this value if you experience lag spikes when sounds play.

These two settings are the first place to look, since they scale the work done for every evaluated sound.

Occlusion Rays

Maximum occlusion rays caps how many rays are used to determine occlusion. It correlates directly with how many blocks between walls are considered. Reducing the maximum limits the occlusion workload.

Simple occlusion changes the calculation itself: when enabled, only one path is traced between the sound source and the listener instead of nine. That is a large reduction in occlusion work.

Update Frequency

Update moving sounds controls whether music discs and other longer sounds are frequently reevaluated. Sound update interval sets, in ticks, how often moving sounds are reevaluated. Lower values mean more frequent reevaluation and more lag; the interval only applies while Update moving sounds is on. Raising the interval, or turning moving-sound updates off, cuts repeated calculation.

Disabling and Skipping Work

Enabled turns all sound effects on or off, which removes the calculation cost entirely.

Sound direction evaluation decides whether the game tries to calculate where a sound should come from based on reflections. Turning it off avoids that work.

Redirect non occluded sounds skips redirecting sounds you can see directly, so unobstructed sounds do not go through the same treatment.

Evaluate ambient sounds controls whether cave, nether, and underwater ambience receive sound physics. Excluding them removes their calculations.

Sound blacklist regex is applied to every sound that plays; if it matches, that sound receives no effects. Blacklisting noisy or unimportant sounds keeps them out of the calculation pipeline.

Several settings change how much simulation is performed rather than how often. Default block reflectivity and Default block occlusion factor set baseline values for all blocks, with lower reflectivity producing a more conservative reverb simulation with shorter tails. Reflectivity and Block Occlusion Factors hold per-block values, and Non full block occlusion factor multiplies occlusion when sound hits a non-full-square side. Reverb attenuation distance sets the ray distance at which reverb starts, and 0.0 disables reverb attenuation. Attenuation factor affects how quiet a sound becomes with distance, Sound distance allowance multiplies how far a source may be and still play, and max occlusion caps the occlusion amount. These do not directly set ray counts, but they shape the simulation the rays feed into.

Diagnosing Remaining Spikes

If spikes persist after lowering the values above, enable the logging options to see where time goes. Debug logging turns on debug output, Occlusion logging adds detail about occlusion, Environment logging adds detail about the environment calculation, and Performance logging reports how long computations take. Render sound bounces draws the sound path in game, and Occlusion visualization draws occlusion in game; both are visual aids rather than performance fixes.

Simple Voice Chat

Two options cover voice audio: one enables or disables sound effects for Simple Voice Chat audio, and another enables or disables hearing your own echo with Simple Voice Chat. Disabling effects for voice chat removes that audio from the sound physics calculations.

Adjust one setting at a time and test with sounds playing, so you can tell which change removed the spike without flattening the acoustics more than necessary.