BionicFX Announces Audio Processing on NVIDIA GPU

[aciddose]

using a gpu for audio processing is pretty impractical. basically, its just using a single processor (which, actually wasnt even designed for anything other than video) to do multiple tasks. if you want to do audio you can use a dsp processor, or even better, in the next couple years we'll be getting seperate general use processors that can be delegated to perform audio or video operations. the whole gpu-for-audio thing is kind of interesting.. although it's been around for years now and in the next couple years even gpus will be starting to become obsolite. it seems like a pretty slim chance this will ever catch on.

[foosnark]

PPUs for game physics have just come out this year, and so far there doesn't seem to be a compelling reason to get one, for the money. GPUs are going to start being physics-capable -- but more importantly, a dual core machine will run a physics thread as fast or faster than a single-core CPU with PPU.

I don't expect GPUs to become obsolete, but rather, the GPU arms race might cool off considerably once the technologies in DirectX 10 are mature. It'll be no more exciting than an IDE bus controller or something

[Lunatique]

Well, if Bionicfx is no more, then I guess I'm up for grabs for UI design again. Who's next?

[aMUSEd]

I thought the UAD cards were built using a Graphics card chip (Chromatic Mpact2 I believe) for the computing power?

[Kingston]

I thought the UAD cards were built using a Graphics card chip (Chromatic Mpact2 I believe) for the computing power?

That's right. funny how much DSP punch such a dated chip still delivers.

[aMUSEd]

Thought so - so using a GPU isn't really such a new idea then and it can be made to work if UAD have managed it (though I guess the newer NVidia chips would be much more powerful but that might not be a good thing as they also might be much more specialised?)

[aMUSEd]

btw - I think I can see a flaw in trying to use a "generic" graphics card though as opposed to UADs approach which is to put the chips on a dedicated audio card that ships with the plugins. The problem is the pace of graphics card development seems very high and it might be difficult to keep up with changes - you've no sooner developed a plugin that works with a particular card and the next gen has been brought out (and bundled with a whole new batch of PC's as well). The other thing is there will be so much variation in which cards people have, especially musicians as musicians tend not to go for grunty graphics cards in their DAWs anyway so are likely to be using a wide variety of outdated models (Matroxes, older Radeons etc).

If you are going to use a GPU better to put it on a dedicated card that you can fine tune the plugin technology and drivers to instead of hoping enough musicians will have the right graphics card on their systems and selling to such a limited market. Maybe its no wonder they seem out of business - business model wasn't well thought out perhaps.

[Aleksey Vaneev]

aMUSEd, there's no such problem as 'pace of development' in regard to video card compatibility. The 'convolution on GPU is working' I was speaking about initially worked on ATI Radeon 9600. I've just noticed that it works even better (and loads much faster overall) on a newer NVidia 7800. So, I guess standards were tossed enough for backwards compatibility to become a reality.