VGA cards as DSP module for VST effects?

[DevonB]

PCI-e, on the other hand, is a direct point-to-point bus that does NOT share with other devices.

But the chipset allocates X amount of bandwidth for PCI-E,whereas a seperate built in DSP would have it's own allocated bandwidth.

I'm not following? Every device is connected to either the north bridge (AGP, memory, and CPU) or the south bridge (PCI devices, usb ports, etc.) A DSP device on the motherboard would still be on the bridge to communicate with the rest of the system, and would be sharing bandwidth with other devices. Some technologies, like Hyper Transport, are attempting to replace the northbridge/southbridge schema, but it will still be some type of bridge.

Are you referring to a module that has its own CPU and memory and does its processing on its own independent of the main CPU?

Devon

[Alan]

Are you referring to a module that has its own CPU and memory and does its processing on its own independent of the main CPU?

Yes,exactly. Motherboards made for DAW. I really can't believe it's taking this long. All it takes is some enterprising company to to team up with some mobo manufacturers,and were off to a new era.

[Kingston]

Wait I thought the UAD-1 is like a powercore... only "made-for-this" plugins and effects work. Unless somebody proves me wrong.

GPU DSP (VGA) would be more open especially for 3rd Party firms, don't you think?

Yeah, that's what I said (or expected everyone to know already).

The point is that the chip in UAD1 is really an old specialised GPU utilised as a propietary DSP chip for all UA plugins.

Powercore isn't based on any old GPU, but run-of-the-mill motorola DSP chips (like protools).

again, what we do need is a generalised DSP C-like programming language and bus interfacing to start programming and exporting plugins to GPUs. Aleksey Vaneev from Voxengo said they had done some research on the subject and also said the AGP interface was too slow to make it useful for plugins. I wonder how PCI-E influences this? on paper it looks better at least.

BrookGPU is looking really good but they are keeping the most important developments hidden somewhere at standford, the available beta version is extremely limited an also hindered by the extremely fast development of new GPU generations. The architecture just keeps changing too fast and there needs to be some standardisation there as well. Luckily this is already happening in the form of universal shader and the very strongly enforced directX api.

Go tech!