** Audio effect processing on your video card **

[japut_99]

brianbrian quoth Universal Audio's UAD-1 dsp card is really a hacked graphics card running UA's drivers and software..

Proof?

There's a lot of speculation about this around.
It most certainly an old 4-meg vga card from chromatic research. Quad pumped. This is great news for anyone who is interested in dsp cards.

[Kingston]

So, what is it that makes a GPU so much more powerfull than a dsp?

As mentioned, the UAD dsp is 1ghz and most GPUs are around 300-500mhz. quite a difference!
Is it the shader processors or is it the fast memory?

let's rephrase that question to "So, what is it that makes a modern GPU so much more powerful than UAD1?

otherwise I'll be babbling on for hours.
at best this will be (highly educated) speculation.

the UAD chip will be more than 5 years old by now, which should pretty much say it all.

GPUs are extremely parallel. That means you will get more simultaneous instructions per clock cycle. It's quite different to CPU (only quite recently started to brach out to more parallelism, SSE, Altivec, etc.). GPU speed comes from this high parallelism, but it untill recently has limited its functionality as a more general processor - there's only so much you can do with short pixel shader insturction set. Nowadays it should be easy to cram filter code with high oversampling into one pass, for example. Branching capabilities are getting better, too.

Also, this is a good time to stop talking about speed in terms of megahertz. This unit will simply stop funtioning when comparing two or three *entirely* different architectures.

If you insist on doing so, think UAD as a one processing block, and think modern GPU as 8 UADs in parallel.

I'm just making examples here. I don't really know much about UAD than that it's old and that it's a DSP chip specialised for multimedia tasks.

GPUs with general processing are more my line of expertise. And I know that they are *fast*.

What it all comes down to, is that you can pretty much do all the basic audio functions within the pixel shader, and as there are so many of them and fast and efficient parallel formation, it all adds up to one hell of a monster processor.

[japut_99]

the UAD chip will be more than 5 years old by now, which should pretty much say it all.

5 years? That card was produced in 1997. 4-meg video card. I wish I could get one of those old rage cards pumping out la-2's.

So we are talking a pci buffer transfer which will probably double your asio latency(or whatever you are using) so this realtime convolution that was mentioned in the initial post is probably not going to be ready for a long time. I hope I'm wrong.

[Kingston]

5 years? That card was produced in 1997.
4-meg video card.

So the designer wasn't kidding when he said scrap yard chip.

[jens]

5 years? That card was produced in 1997. 4-meg video card. I wish I could get one of those old rage cards pumping out la-2's.

that's what I was asking myself - could you use an old mpact2 card to run the ua software on it?
Could you maybe 'quadpunp' it on your own?

If so it would mean you could buy one uad-1 to get the software and then 'upgrade' the cpu easily by just putting anoother one of those cards inside your machine.

It probably isn't that simple, or is it?

[ptodd]

I don't know that much about all this, but I've started to do a little bit of graphics stuff with GEM (for pd) recently.... So with a big FWIW,,, I tried disabling hardware accelaration on my Mobility Radeon 9000, and stuff that normally runs absolutely fine (say 60fps @ 1024*768 with no problems), was struggling to run at an acceptable frame rate on a little 200*200 or so window (on my 3ghz p4). This was doing very much more pixel-processing intensive than anything else type of work, which as I understand it would be employing hardware that was perfectly well suited to other generic DSP processes (like audio processing).

So, little as I know about this hardware, I'm starting to get a feel for the relative amount of power that even a far from top of the range GPU might be able to provide, if it really was effectively harnessed.

[snooky]

this is all very exiting...

It´s worth mentioning that the latest CPUs are manufactured with a 0.20-0.15 micron transistor size...the new GPUs have transistors in the 0.13 micron size. (I think it´s correct)

Also, I belive that an Intel P4 chip has about 90 million transistors and a new generation GPU has about 200 million+

[VitaminD]

that's what I was asking myself - could you use an old mpact2 card to run the ua software on it?
Could you maybe 'quadpunp' it on your own?

If so it would mean you could buy one uad-1 to get the software and then 'upgrade' the cpu easily by just putting anoother one of those cards inside your machine.

It probably isn't that simple, or is it?

yeah I'm wondering this too..


but so far I havent seen any proof that says UAD was an old video card.. just a lot of heresay and no proof... not to say it isnt true but lets see the facts for ourselves - where are they?

[Ixox]

It´s worth mentioning that the latest CPUs are manufactured with a 0.20-0.15 micron transistor size...the new GPUs have transistors in the 0.13 micron size. (I think it´s correct)

I think it's not.
Last CPU have a 0.09 micron transistor size...
Last GPU 0.13/0.11.....

[Kingston]

It´s worth mentioning that the latest CPUs are manufactured with a 0.20-0.15 micron transistor size...the new GPUs have transistors in the 0.13 micron size. (I think it´s correct)

I think it's not.
Last CPU have a 0.09 micron transistor size...
Last GPU 0.13/0.11.....

quite irrelevant though.

They are still nowhere near comparable, whether mhz, micron or transistor count.

[Ixox]

It´s worth mentioning that the latest CPUs are manufactured with a 0.20-0.15 micron transistor size...the new GPUs have transistors in the 0.13 micron size. (I think it´s correct)

I think it's not.
Last CPU have a 0.09 micron transistor size...
Last GPU 0.13/0.11.....

quite irrelevant though.
They are still nowhere near comparable, whether mhz, micron or transistor count.

I agree.
It's interesting to know that geforce 3/4 generation were able to compute around 200 operations at each clock tick through all the 3D pipeline (floating point in the vertex, and integers in the pixel if i'm correct).

Last GPU can do much better, all in 32 bits floating point, and are fully programmable.
If one can provide a nice language dedicated to audio, that would be very exciting and can, why not, become a standard...
"This VST supports SSE, 3DNow, DirectX9 shading language"...

[Kingston]

If one can provide a nice language dedicated to audio, that would be very exciting and can, why not, become a standard...
"This VST supports SSE, 3DNow, DirectX9 shading language"...

Funny and too good to be true as it sounds, there's already the Brook GPU. With every new revision and GPU generation, it's homing in on standard C, and is by far the most serious project of its kind, with massive funding and everything.

http://graphics.stanford.edu/projects/b ... index.html

Good to be in this business indeed.

[Jeremy_NSL]

why modern gpus are so fast and modern dsp audio cards (uad1, powercore) so slow:

it all boils down to games. GPU manufacturers have a huge, competitive market. Gamers want photorealism and they want it now, and for cheap. Competition is driving massive amounts of R&D dollars into the GPU market. If GPU makers cut corners on image-quality, journalists will find out and crucify them.

otoh, the pro-audio card sector is a very small market,with little competition. There is much less money for R&D. Audio is also more subjective - manufacturers can get away with a less complex part as long as the end result sounds decent. Finally most of the pro-audio sector is content to pay major dosh for audio cards, prices much higher than a gamer would ever consider. All these factors contribute to manufacturers trotting out old, slow hardware as the latest and greatest.

Thats why this GPU/audio thing sounds great If it can give the UAD, Powercore etc some competition, they may be forced to actually make cards with decent technology for a fair price!

[Amberience]

Gamers want photorealism and they want it now, and for cheap.

Well I wanna run 300 instances of Ambience.. and I WANT IT NOW!!

[Scotty]

I think the UAD ( I have the project pak) is a tremendous value. It cost under $500.00 and can host quite a range of top drawer plug-ins without affecting the host all that much. It is pretty cost effective in my view.