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Understanding the Components of the Memory Manager

The Wwise sound engine has a Memory Manager to manage the memory dedicated to the audio in your game. The Memory Manager is initialized by the audio programmer at the startup of your game. When initializing the Memory Manager, the programmer must also create a specific number of memory pools to manage the different audio components in your game.

There are three different types of memory pools in Wwise:

  • Default memory pool - A general usage pool for high-level sound structures. This pool mostly contains the following:

    • Audio structural content.

    • Command queue for posted events.

    • Allocations for registered game objects, game object positions, listeners, RTPCs, Switches, States, and so on.

  • Lower engine memory pool - The main audio processing pipeline pool. This pool is generally used for audio playback, audio processing, memory allocated for effects, and so on.

  • Media memory pool - A general usage pool that contains a copy of the media files contained on the disk.

When creating the memory pools for your game, the audio programmer must also define their size. Once a pool is created, it cannot be resized. Memory pools can be created and destroyed during the entire lifetime of the Memory Manager. Pools are segmented into blocks of equal size representing the smallest allocation unit.

You can override the Memory Manager with any other technology, from internal to Unreal, for example. For more information on implementing a custom memory manager, refer to the section Overriding the Memory Manager in the Wwise SDK documentation.


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