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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.
The amount of silicon on an average GPU overtook the amount of silicon on the average CPU some time ago.
Having all that processing power available to do more than just shift pixels makes perfect sense. I'm just surprised that nobody thought of doing it sooner.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
While most audio workstations may not have great video cards at the current time, I'd go spend $500 on a video card that'd take 90% of the workload off my processor while mixing ... it's cheaper than a lot of equipment out there.
;)
And the ability to get a few frags in while the band is taking a break isn't too bad either!
Who doesn't like free music?
Personally, I'd like to see search algorithms (perhaps data-search, perhaps even video search) move to suchc a co-processor.
Pretty soon my graphics card is going to do more, cost more, heat up more, be louder and use more electricity than the rest of my computer combined.
It sounds like we should buy a computer with a GPU on the motherboard and plug in an expansion card with a CPU on it.
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
dude...the sound man...i can SEE it...sound and sight man, its all the same....far out man....
Moo.
Now I'm going to have to find a motherboard that I could use to play Doom3 on that supported 2 video cards
(one for video, one for sound)
These innovations are getting pricey!!!
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This kind of stuff has been talked about and done in the research community for quite some time now. See http://www.gpgpu.org. While audio is an interesting idea, FFT's and Genomics are already running on GPUs Yes, GPU's can be fast, but they can also be a pain to program. Take a look at the Stanford Brook for GPU's project for a nice elegant way to program for GPUs. http://brook.sourceforce.net
Now let's see some video rendering on our audio cards.
BLING BLING. Meet the architecture that's changing everything.
A GPU is much faster, but only when doing certain very specific types of operations. If you tried to write a word processor for the GeForce, it would at best run terribly slow, and at worst be an impossible task.
GPUs are not really all that powerful compared to a CPU, but they're working with a totally different set of constraints.
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Of course it can. A price range can be slow, a processing power can be sfast, and the distance can be measured in smetres.
Anytime there is an article talking about the power of your graphics card's GPU or the phenomenal processing power of DSPs, the discussion is always inundated with people asking "Hey why aren't we using these instead of our regular slow processors!", thinking they've come up with some sort of brilliant idea. For the thousandth time, people, things just don't work that way. DSPs achieve their high processing speeds by being very good at a few select things, but not really being general purpose devices. If you want to know more of the specific details, do a google search, there's a ton of information about DSPs on the web and I'm sure there are plenty of pages that explicitly address the difference between CPUS, GPUs and DSPs.
People are doing extremely interesting things with modern graphics hardware, including fluid dynamics simulation, cloud simulation and multiplication of large matrices.
A good site for information on it is www.gpgpu.org, where there are perhaps 200 different projects related to general purpose GFX card use.
As the capabilities of graphics cards expand and become more esoteric, perhaps game developers will begin to eschew the use of certain graphics featuers in favor of using those parts of the pipeline to perform generic calculations, such as physics.
Perhaps there are also ways of performing such calculations and using the results as decorative graphics, ie when we're showing decorative ripples on water, perhaps those ripples are artifacts of some calculation that is being used elsewhere in the game.
Intolerance for ambiguity is the mark of the authoritarian personality.
I hear if you drop LSD, your brain can do the same audio to video conversion much faster than even the Nvidia graphics card can. But that's just what I heard.
what dedicated hardware can do. It's an proven fact and anyone that works with embeded systems can testify to the performance. We need to stop flaunting 3+ gigahertz processors using archaic instruction sets and focus on routing data to hardware that can handle the task.
If the CPU was nothing but a router and directed data to dedicated hardware (network cards, GPU with integrated physics engine, harddisk controller, etc) we can get away from inefficient execution tied up in an architecture that 99% of the market depends on.
Computers were built with modularity in mind. We need to get back to those roots as it's not only a good idea, but the only way we're going to get past some performance barriers.
- Dan
Tom Rokicki computed the Game of Life using Amiga's Blitter. March 17, 1987 UseNet post.
*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/
I work in the video games industry. Using graphics processor for audio is not new. The Nintendo 64 had a "Reality-Engine" graphics coprocessor that also processed sound by uploading new microcode.
If you think about it, things like bilinear/trilinear filtering are perfect for resampling, graphic blendops like add/subtract/modulate are great for audio mixing and can be done with even older fixed function hardware and bit of programming effort. The programmability of new hardware with pixel and vertex shaders improves the generic applications of the GPU by orders of magnitude and allows significantly more non-graphic algorithms to be implemented.
If you overclock it, does that mean your mp3s all start to sound ike Alvin and the Chipmunks?
Wait - what happens to the Chipmunk mp3s?
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ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
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
And THEN we'll finally have our Amigas back!
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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i mean seriously... what would you ever need that much audio processing power for? distributed key cracking however....