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#1
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Audio processing via GPU
Came across a very interesting subject -- Efficient 3D Audio
Processing on the GPU. It's available at http://www-sop.inria.fr/reves/projects/GPUAudio/ What interest about it is the ingenuity of the project, in tapping into the enormous power of the GPU -- even the low-end videocards based on Radeon HD 2600 GPU has 120 stream processors running in parallel !!! -- in doing something truly amazing. According to the article -- in comparing an optimized SSE assembly code running on a Pentium 4 3GHz processor and an equivalent Cg/OpenGL implementation running on a nVidia GeForce FX 5950 Ultra graphics board on AGP 8x, with the following result .... "The SSE implementation achieves real-time binaural rendering of 700 sound sources, while the GPU renders up to 580 in one time-frame (about 22.5 ms). Assuming floating-point texture resampling could be done in hardware, not requiring explicit interpolation in the shader, the GPU could render up to 1050 sources. For mono processing, the GPU treats up to 2150 (1 texture fetch) / 1200 (2 texture fetches and linear interpolation) sources, while the CPU handles 1400 in the same amount of time. On average, the GPU implementation was about 20% slower than the SSE implementation but would become 50% faster if floating-point texture resampling was supported in hardware." If you read the above quote, please pay attention to the fact that the GPU was an ancient GeForce FX 5950 Ultra, circa 2003 !! Imagine what we can achieve with super-duper-ultra-powerful GPUs that are on our videocards?? And if that's not enough, imagine what we can do if we can tap into the raw power of the GPUs, with assembly language?? The entire soundcard industry would crash and burn overnite !! |
#2
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Audio processing via GPU
wrote in message ... Came across a very interesting subject -- Efficient 3D Audio Processing on the GPU. It's available at http://www-sop.inria.fr/reves/projects/GPUAudio/ What interest about it is the ingenuity of the project, in tapping into the enormous power of the GPU -- even the low-end videocards based on Radeon HD 2600 GPU has 120 stream processors running in parallel !!! -- in doing something truly amazing. According to the article -- in comparing an optimized SSE assembly code running on a Pentium 4 3GHz processor and an equivalent Cg/OpenGL implementation running on a nVidia GeForce FX 5950 Ultra graphics board on AGP 8x, with the following result .... "The SSE implementation achieves real-time binaural rendering of 700 sound sources, while the GPU renders up to 580 in one time-frame (about 22.5 ms). Assuming floating-point texture resampling could be done in hardware, not requiring explicit interpolation in the shader, the GPU could render up to 1050 sources. For mono processing, the GPU treats up to 2150 (1 texture fetch) / 1200 (2 texture fetches and linear interpolation) sources, while the CPU handles 1400 in the same amount of time. On average, the GPU implementation was about 20% slower than the SSE implementation but would become 50% faster if floating-point texture resampling was supported in hardware." If you read the above quote, please pay attention to the fact that the GPU was an ancient GeForce FX 5950 Ultra, circa 2003 !! Imagine what we can achieve with super-duper-ultra-powerful GPUs that are on our videocards?? And if that's not enough, imagine what we can do if we can tap into the raw power of the GPUs, with assembly language?? The entire soundcard industry would crash and burn overnite !! This processing power is all well and good but it does not and cannot solve the problem of poor-sounding DACs (and ADCs) that give the soundcard it's tonal quality and character (or not). You can keep audio in the digital domain for so long, but it needs to be converted to an analog signal before you can hear it. Good DACs are still expensive to buy new, even in bulk, to mount on a soundcard or other audio device. Perhaps if someone could find a way to wire those 'dual 400MHz RAM|DACs' on Nvidia cards for sound output?? Somehow I still doubt that they'd sound anything like a pair of Burr-Brown DACs from 1989. Dr.White. |
#3
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Audio processing via GPU
wrote: Came across a very interesting subject -- Efficient 3D Audio Processing on the GPU. It's available at http://www-sop.inria.fr/reves/projects/GPUAudio/ What interest about it is the ingenuity of the project... Yes, GPUs show a lot of abilities which can be used for many non 3D-graphic issues as well. Last thing I heard, it may be capabible for speach to text/command already, beside FFT or matrix-calculations. AMD did a real good job on ATI cards here... even I still have some problems to convert recent published docs into hardware driver solutions. Perhaps I need to read it several times (as usual required Nvidea is still an invisible dog within my reach... Any hints ? __ wolfgang |
#4
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Audio processing via GPU
wrote in message ... Came across a very interesting subject -- Efficient 3D Audio Processing on the GPU. snip If you read the above quote, please pay attention to the fact that the GPU was an ancient GeForce FX 5950 Ultra, circa 2003 !! Imagine what we can achieve with super-duper-ultra-powerful GPUs that are on our videocards?? you... know... what... sound processing is usually a minor enough task (not usually all that CPU intensive), and usually tweaky enough (most actually CPU-intensive audio-processing tasks are not those well suited to the GPU pipeline), that at present there is little practical reason to do most audio processing tasks on the GPU... for some narrow commercial or scientific tasks, this could be useful, but for most general uses, it makes no real difference... And if that's not enough, imagine what we can do if we can tap into the raw power of the GPUs, with assembly language?? The entire soundcard industry would crash and burn overnite !! you know what... most soundcards are little more than glorified DACs, ADCs, and the machinery to get the audio to/from said DACs and ADCs. the older SoundBlaster cards used DMA to move data to/from the cards (program the IO ports, handle IRQs, and mess with the DMA controller). AFAIK nearly all newer soundcards just use some memory-mapped buffer or are mapped into the address space somewhere, and the card itself plays this region in a loop, leaving it up to the driver to manage the specifics. unlike video cards, the soundcard doesn't "do" a whole lot anymore, mostly just hadling said raw PCM data in its buffers, with nearly everything else (mixing, midi-playback, ... being done in software, usually by the drivers, the task of the drivers then is to periodically "paint" the samples to be played into the buffer, avoiding that annoying looped-sound effect so evident of a hard-freeze...). and, in fact, some video cards now include soundcards (for example, the ATI HD 2400), the reason being to allow sound output through said HDMI cables (in my front room, for example, this serves to run both audio and video from the computer to the TV). presumably, much like the onboard variant, this is just another address-space mapped buffer. so, then: given "most" people I think anymore just use onboard audio anyways; the DAC's and ADC's (and maybe also amplifier circuits, ...) are still needed for any sound to come out of the computer; .... thus, there is really nothing to be overturned... this is about like saying laptops are going to overthrow the cellphone industry... |
#5
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Audio processing via GPU
"cr88192" wrote in message ... wrote in message ... Came across a very interesting subject -- Efficient 3D Audio Processing on the GPU. snip If you read the above quote, please pay attention to the fact that the GPU was an ancient GeForce FX 5950 Ultra, circa 2003 !! Imagine what we can achieve with super-duper-ultra-powerful GPUs that are on our videocards?? you... know... what... sound processing is usually a minor enough task (not usually all that CPU intensive), and usually tweaky enough (most actually CPU-intensive audio-processing tasks are not those well suited to the GPU pipeline), that at present there is little practical reason to do most audio processing tasks on the GPU... for some narrow commercial or scientific tasks, this could be useful, but for most general uses, it makes no real difference... And if that's not enough, imagine what we can do if we can tap into the raw power of the GPUs, with assembly language?? The entire soundcard industry would crash and burn overnite !! you know what... most soundcards are little more than glorified DACs, ADCs, and the machinery to get the audio to/from said DACs and ADCs. the older SoundBlaster cards used DMA to move data to/from the cards (program the IO ports, handle IRQs, and mess with the DMA controller). AFAIK nearly all newer soundcards just use some memory-mapped buffer or are mapped into the address space somewhere, and the card itself plays this region in a loop, leaving it up to the driver to manage the specifics. unlike video cards, the soundcard doesn't "do" a whole lot anymore, mostly just hadling said raw PCM data in its buffers, with nearly everything else (mixing, midi-playback, ... being done in software, usually by the drivers, the task of the drivers then is to periodically "paint" the samples to be played into the buffer, avoiding that annoying looped-sound effect so evident of a hard-freeze...). and, in fact, some video cards now include soundcards (for example, the ATI HD 2400), the reason being to allow sound output through said HDMI cables (in my front room, for example, this serves to run both audio and video from the computer to the TV). presumably, much like the onboard variant, this is just another address-space mapped buffer. so, then: given "most" people I think anymore just use onboard audio anyways; the DAC's and ADC's (and maybe also amplifier circuits, ...) are still needed for any sound to come out of the computer; ... thus, there is really nothing to be overturned... this is about like saying laptops are going to overthrow the cellphone industry... c' mon the bloke is jusy jazzed about sound. ** no fate ** dracman .................................................. ............... Posted via TITANnews - Uncensored Newsgroups Access at http://www.TitanNews.com -=Every Newsgroup - Anonymous, UNCENSORED, BROADBAND Downloads=- |
#6
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Audio processing via GPU
Dr.White wrote:
Good DACs are still expensive to buy new, even in bulk, to mount on a soundcard or other audio device. When bought in bulk they are not expensive. I read about five bucks each, depending on which DAC. |
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