Qualcomm Aims at Bluetooth for Gamers With S3 Gen 2 USB Dongles

pcmag.com:

Qualcomm is expanding its S3 Gen 2 sound platform with a focus on making Bluetooth more appealing for gaming. The new additions the platform focuses on aim to reduce latency for audio streams while reinforcing and advancing other planned features.

The S3 Gen 2 sound platform is one of Qualcomm's mobile audio ecosystems. It provides a technological base and framework on which device manufacturers can build consumer products. This upgrade to the platform adds enhanced support for USB adapters, enabling new Bluetooth dongles to offer lower-latency, higher-quality audio streams, and LE Audio features.

On the gaming side, Qualcomm claims USB adapters made based on the S3 Gen 2 platform can reduce lag to as low as 20 milliseconds, down from 80ms for most other Bluetooth adapters and 48ms from LE Audio Bluetooth adapters. One of the biggest concerns for game audio is making sure its latency is low enough to keep up with what you're playing, which is why most wireless gaming headsets use faster 2.4GHz connections instead of Bluetooth.

For comparison, on the video side we currently consider TVs with visual input lag of less than 10ms to be considered good for gaming. But before significant improvements in TVs' responsiveness over the past couple years, that threshold was 20ms.

While this announcement is focused on further reducing latency, the addition of USB adapter support to the S3 Gen 2 platform means LE Audio (a newer Bluetooth audio standard introduced last year) features including Auracast could potentially be added to devices that aren't already built with them.

Auracast enables multi-point Bluetooth broadcasts that let several users stream audio from a single source. This is primarily a commercial and educational