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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
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.
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!!!
HallmarkOrnaments.Com
Now let's see some video rendering on our audio cards.
BLING BLING. Meet the architecture that's changing everything.
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.
Tom Rokicki computed the Game of Life using Amiga's Blitter. March 17, 1987 UseNet post.
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.
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
> A processor to make saving files effeicent,
> A processor to sort out and verify that Network activity is correct.
> A processor to adjust Audio properly
> A processor for Graphics
I think you meant:
One processor for the audio kings playing their song
One for the graphics-lords under their rainbows
One for network men, pushing bits along
One for the dark lord through his dark windows
One processor to rule them all, One processor to discover them
One processor to bring them all and on the bus bind them...
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
So far Cann cannot take as much performance away from the GPU as he would like. "Right now, getting the data back from the video card is very slow, so the overall performance isn't even close to the theoretical max of the card. I am hoping that the PCI Express architecture will resolve this. This will mean more instances of effects running at higher sample rates," he said.
so it appears that there may really be a problem here... a GPU will normally do a bunch of calculations, then the raster goes *out* to the monitor, not *back* to the bus... I can see how getting data back out to the bus might be an issue. A "real" DSP/audio card would certainly be better, and they aren't *all* as expensive as the original article would have you believe... a quick google found at least one decent-looking DSP card for ~$500 out there, and I'm sure there are others, probably for cheaper ( the quoted price is for a card *and* a stack of software ), if you looked around a bit... if you're considering plunking down the cash for a PCI-X machine and a good GPU, you probably have a ~$500 for a good DSP card, too, and a special-purpose solution *designed* for the purpose at hand is almost always going to be better than repurposing a *different* special-purpose product.
Did that make sense? What I'm trying to say is that you'd be much better off buying an actual DSP audio card than buying two GPUs. That'd just be silly. This repurposed GPU stuff is just for folks unwilling to buy an extra card, but who have a nice GPU already.
And THEN we'll finally have our Amigas back!