Anyone seen this:-

[Mr. Tingle]

http://www.nforcershq.com/article1853.html

looks promising

[Kingston]

Yep. seen it about a year a go. Either the company got bought out for having a good idea, or they define 'Vaporware'. There's a slight chance they're still waiting for the "next generation GPU". Or maybe they're finally getting ready to release something. Their website design has changed since I last saw it.

God only knows.

[mandolarian]

Yes, looks interesting, but while your video card is processing your audio, you have to hookup your screen to your sound card.

[Kingston]

Yes, looks interesting, but while your video card is processing your audio, you have to hookup your screen to your sound card.

Jesus H Christ!


Erm, it doesn't quite work like that.

[Frippertronix]

I'm waiting for someone to just realease a powerful, generic DSP audio card that runs native software. Like a UAD-1 but for native stuff.

Or am I wrong and does this already exist?

[valley]

I'm waiting for someone to just realease a powerful, generic DSP audio card that runs native software. Like a UAD-1 but for native stuff.

I'd be very surprised if such a thing ever happens.

Using the video card hardware[1] to accelerate plugins is a real possibility. A card that virtualises a PC ala VMWare, offshores processing to a DSP in a an efficient manner, and that doesn't actually waste more cycles working its magic that it saves, frankly would be a technical marvel.

On the other hand, gigabit networking is making the idea of tools like fxteleport greatly more appealing...

[1] or physics processors for that matter, as it seems the hot money is on dedicated physics modelling cards appearing for high end gamers within a few years or so.

[Frippertronix]

I'm waiting for someone to just realease a powerful, generic DSP audio card that runs native software. Like a UAD-1 but for native stuff.

I'd be very surprised if such a thing ever happens.

Using the video card hardware[1] to accelerate plugins is a real possibility. A card that virtualises a PC ala VMWare, offshores processing to a DSP in a an efficient manner, and that doesn't actually waste more cycles working its magic that it saves, frankly would be a technical marvel.

Why is it better if a video card does it instead of, say a PCI express DSP audio card? Video processing is moving over to PCI-E anyway now. What's the advantage in using the video card vs. a card designed for audio tasking if they are both on the same bus?

[rich_h]

I suppose one advantage to using a GPU with modern cards would be that if you're running audio/midi stuff then the graphics card is only using a fraction of its power, and so using the spare capacity for other things could be useful.

[ObsoleteAcc99]

[DELETED]

[Hypertone]

I heard the UAD-1 is basically a hacked video card.

[haydxn]

@frippertronics: you're missing valley's point there. the question is about getting an add-on card to give you more general processing power for NATIVE vst plugins. that would not be a DSP card, which would require specially coded plugins to run with. It would require something that is compatible with the instructions of the main processor, and the chances of getting something that can execute normal code on a mere add-on card and have it worthwhile is very small.

[Spaceman Sounds]

Graphics cards have a huge floating point, more than cpu's sometimes.

[stefancrs]

And... They have standards. Any audio dsp stuff you'd do on a GPU you'd do using ordinary shader code, which means that you can choose between a whole bunch of different card manufacturers etc.

Also, GPU development is much faster than ordinary DSP chip development, due to it's huge market. Lots of bang for the buck, and you can get the cards in your local computer store.

[valley]

Why is it better if a video card does it instead of, say a PCI express DSP audio card?

I wasn't actually saying it is better, just that it is more realistic. Providing DSP acceleration to plugins that know about the accelerator is one thing. Doing it for plugins that are totally native is quite another.

That said:

Video processing is moving over to PCI-E anyway now. What's the advantage in using the video card vs. a card designed for audio tasking if they are both on the same bus?

AGP shared resources with the PCI bus, PCI-E is not a step backwards in any form. And there are clear advantages to the 16x bus used by video cards over the 1x or 4x used by everything else. The huge bandwidth of the video card bus could allow for a massive amount of realtime audio streams. SLI type motherboards would just double the fun too.

[Frippertronix]

I'm about to get one of the next gen motherboards, but I don't have PCI-E right now. Is PCI-E for video cards different than the PCI-E sockets for all other cards? I just see things advertised as "PCI-E video card" so I didn't know if there is a special PCI-E bus and/or socket specifically for video.