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Audio Processing on Your Graphics Card?
edsarkiss writes "BionicFX has announced Audio Video EXchange (AVEX), a technology that transforms real-time audio into video and performs audio effect processing on the GPU of your NVIDIA 3D video card, the latest of which are apparently capable of more than 40 gigaflops of processing power compared to less than 6 gigaflops on Intel and AMD CPUs." Another reader points out a story on Tom's Hardware.
Personally, I'd like to see search algorithms (perhaps data-search, perhaps even video search) move to suchc a co-processor.
Because graphics cards (and other devices using DSP chips) are not really general purpose processors, they're very good at a few specific things.
Come and see the violence inherent in the system!
Unfortunately, it's not quite that simple. While the GPU can do many more operations per second than a CPU, think of the two as doctors.
<analogy accuracy="flawed at best">
The CPU's a generalist and can treat most patients in a fair amount of time. The GPU is a specialist, however. If you know any of these in real life, you know that they can do one thing, and one thing only. In this case, it's graphics. You ask them to do something else, like gardening, and they look at you like you're from outer space.
</analogy>
Especially if the FPS is already above the vertical refresh rate of your monitor... what good is 200 FPS when the monitor can only update at 80-85 FPS?
"There are a dozen opinions on a matter until you know the truth. Then there is only one." - CS Lewis (paraprhase)
*chuckles* I love this, people are saying how old this tech is by talking about projects from a year ago.
/. about how cool their "new" toys are.
The concept of using a CPU to do I/O and other "OS stuff" for a vector processor is a wee bit older then that.
Maybe you remember the Cray 1? Or all those i860's we used to use on cards back in the 286 days?
Those who forget history are doomed to post on
- Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
Some functions of a word processor (grammar checking, for one) would be well suited to a GPU...the algorithm is relatively small, the processing per byte of data relatively high, and the result need not be immediate.
That's what GPUs are designed for -- performing massively iterative algorithms on sets of data and returning the processed dataset. There are lots of algorithms that might benefit from this: encoding better digital video, searching for patterns, crunching numbers for encryption, etc. There are also lots of algorithms that would be NO GOOD -- SQL select statements, for example, or rendering web pages. Basically, any time processing is low and I/O is high, the GPU is a bad idea.
Think of the GPU as a tiny little distributed computing network on your own computer. And thank the video game industry for finally making signal co-processors commercially viable.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
Add to the mix the PCI-X architecture and you are no longer limited to one graphics card, as you are with AGP. So at this point you could have two or more graphics cards doing audio processing.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
It seems likely that we'll soon see high octane media coprocessors as standard equipment on PCs. Before long, all PCs will be "audio workstations", as well as video workstations, photo processors, movie theaters, two-way video telephones, game boxes, etc.--a lot of it simultaneously.
Oh, wait. They already are, but they're just trying to do most of this stuff with an x86 chip. Silly. It's not inconceivable that the future of PCs is a block of powerful media processors where the x86 chip will end up being the "code coprocessor"....
"Those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded."
What kind of latency does this pose?
There are currently lesser expensive audio DSP cards on the market (UAD 1 by Universal Audio/Kind of Loud, and the TC Powercore, and nowadays they don't cost much more than a GPU. However on both of those cards the latency is pretty harsh. Many audio system will compensate for the latency in some instances, although some can't/don't compensate for bussed effects, which is unfortunate as reverb is the greatest reason to use a card like this, and it is a bus effect typically, and the extra delay incurred acts to set a huge, usually inappropriate predelay.
Of course there will always be those willing to work around the potential latency issues, however that defeats the purpose that they state on their site (no more freezing/bouncing/yelling at the machine).
This is exactly why Protools TDM systems are still in vogue for higher end studios and producers. The TDM hardware does just about everything as offloaded DSP, therefore the latency is extremely low, fixed, and documented. You can look up (command-click on the track volume display actually) to find out the amount of latency on a track in samples, and if there is a need to compensate than you can figure it out. Although typically one doesn't need to compensate for only 20 samples of latency as that is less than you might find in a analog studio using digital effects.
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GPU were NEVER a threat to cpus. They became only usable for ANYTHING but graphics with the introduction of vertex and pixelshaders, e.g. with the R100 or NV10 chips. Really usable are only chips with ps2, end even those can rarely archive "better then cpu" performance, even with tuned algorithms (main problem is memory access fragmentation breaking the caching strategies and causing pipeline stalls (wasting 100s of cyles) and multipass overhead because many implementations need 1000s of passes).
10 years ago graphic cards had ZERO FLOPS, because they couldnt even do floating point math.
The AGP port was invented because PCI WAS TOO FUCKING SLOW. At the time intel was about to enter the VGA buisness (at that time graphic chips werent programmable, so NO GPUs) with the i740 and later the i752 chips, which had (in comparison) exellent AGP support.
And no, 66Mhz PCI was NO solution, because other cards would pull down the bus. And pci-x was WAY later, and 64bit pci isnt backward compatible.
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?