DSP cards

fluffy · Post by **fluffy** » Sun Jan 15, 2006 1:15 pm

What I'd like to see is <a href="http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/co ... reImage</a> but for audio. Graphics cards actually have a lot of DSP-style capability in them which is largely untapped, and as a rule, when you're doing heavy audio processing you're typically not doing much in the way of video processing, so you have this nice BIG chunk of DSP power being almost totally unused.

I bet CoreImage could be leveraged to provide DSP functionality, even. I wish I had the time to learn OSX programming.

Me$$iah · Post by **Me$$iah** » Mon Jan 16, 2006 12:27 am

THC

congrats on your purchase. Enjoy them DSPs

Fluffy

So you want the extra power of DSPs using the graphics card, but dont want the power provided by DSPs on a card designed for audio...!
I agree tho that if its possible to use processing power from the Graphics card to help with audio. That can only be good. But if you want extra resources then why not add a DSP card.

fluffy · Post by **fluffy** » Mon Jan 16, 2006 12:32 am

I didn't say I don't want DSP's extra resources, just that the concept of having an audio-specific addon card is an antiquated way of doing things with very little benefit in this day and age. Especially considering that most new computers already have a huge untapped DSP in them already. But even then, the main CPU is already much beefier than most DSP cards which are also limited in the bus which connects them to the system and so on.

Me$$iah · Post by **Me$$iah** » Mon Jan 16, 2006 6:25 am

fluffy wrote:I didn't say I don't want DSP's extra resources

Double negative. So you do want DSPs

heheheeh

just kidding... I see what youre saying, and I agree, that computers are getting so much better all the time and with things like fxteleport or ADAT 2 or more comps can be linked with minimum latency etc.
However, no matter what, in the future Ill always have (hopefully) my DSPs, maybe running eventuallying in their own exclusive box, but I always have these DSPs to do the kob I want them to. They do it really well. I think extra gear is always a plus. You can always choose not to use it. You cant choose to use it tho if you aint got it.

thehipcola · Post by **thehipcola** » Mon Jan 16, 2006 7:32 am

I don't think DSP is antiquated...I don't see many (actually, none that I know of, but I'm not "in-the-know" about these things) PC's offering up chunks of their CPU processing for audio processing specifically yet. And to say there is no benefit??? That makes no sense. I'm running a P4 2.53ghz... (not an old machine) and it's just a normal box, and unless I'm missing something (entirely possible!), there is NO way to access this native DSP power you've mentioned. The dsp card allows more complex algorithms to be processed without reducing the number of tracks and native processing that can occur. Does that count as a benefit? It does for me. Fluffy, are there any examples of these computers that have this functionality you mentioned, like now? Or is it still in development?

tonetripper · Post by **tonetripper** » Mon Jan 16, 2006 11:29 am

I just bought my UAD card, reluctantly, and don't know why I didn't get into one of those bad boys before. The mastering tools are really something else compared to my arsenal of plugins. My plugin ratio doubled. I basically want to throw away over half of the shitass plugins I have in favour of these ones. Mostly for mastering IMHO.

The plate 140 reverb is, bar none, one of the best plugins I've heard. Like everything though it's really personal choice, but I've already gone back through some stuff and tested these on the master buss of a mix and have been amazed at how much more pro it sounds than various configurations of plugs to achieve a similar but inferior sound. Very transparent.

One thing has been bumming me out though is that I upped my RAM from 1G to 2G and tried to see if there was a difference in CPU load on the performance meter of the UAD-1 and there was no change. I didn't even register a change in the Cubase performance meter. I altered the buffer size in the 1010 - no change. I re-loaded the UAD driver to maybe accomodate the upped RAM - nothing. I figured doubling my RAM might make things more sleek. It's booting up that I have 2 G of RAM. Is there something I'm not doing to make it more efficient with the RAM?! In Cubase or the Bios?!

I've been on every frigging forum to do with the issue and no answers. I'm thinking the RAM was a waste of money.

fluffy · Post by **fluffy** » Mon Jan 16, 2006 11:38 am

CPUs have had DSP-like functionality for years, via MMX, SSE, 3DNow, AltiVec, etc. It's not dedicated to audio, it's general-purpose stuff, but for the most part the CPU isn't all that busy while doing audio mixing; it's mostly waiting for data to come across the bus. Anyway, just because something's dedicated to audio doesn't mean it's any better (one good example of this is the Gravis Ultrasound, which was an audio wavetable coprocessor which helped on a 386/25 but was actually significantly slower than a 486/100 for audio processing, and on a Pentium 90 it wasn't even worth the overhead of managing the card and uploading sample data to it vs. just doing it all in software).

What's more, many many MANY new computers are currently (or soon going to be) dual-processor systems (every current Apple system aside from the Mini and the iBook, for example, and even they're probably going to go dual-core when the Intel transition is complete), so one CPU can do all of the annoying data shuffling while the other does all the audio processing. Modern OSes with decent multithreading also help a lot in this.

The only advantage of DSPs is that it's easier to add a whole bunch of them to a computer, but very quickly you'll run into bus contention problems anyway. PCI-Express will help with this, but then you'll run into memory contention instead, which isn't really much better.

Meanwhile, graphics cards HAVE general-purpose DSP functionality on them, AND they're almost completely untapped while audio software is running, AND they're already typically sitting on a 16x PCI-Express bus meaning they have just as fast memory access as the CPU itself.

Leaf · Post by **Leaf** » Mon Jan 16, 2006 11:39 am

...well, waste of money for you.. but as I'm sitting at 1g right now, if I find out it WAS a waste, I won't have to bother doing the same thing...

suppose I'll buy you a beer or two someday for the research saving though man!

fluffy · Post by **fluffy** » Mon Jan 16, 2006 11:41 am

tonetripper wrote:One thing has been bumming me out though is that I upped my RAM from 1G to 2G and tried to see if there was a difference in CPU load on the performance meter of the UAD-1 and there was no change. I didn't even register a change in the Cubase performance meter. I altered the buffer size in the 1010 - no change. I re-loaded the UAD driver to maybe accomodate the upped RAM - nothing. I figured doubling my RAM might make things more sleek. It's booting up that I have 2 G of RAM. Is there something I'm not doing to make it more efficient with the RAM?! In Cubase or the Bios?!

RAM decreases paging. If your system is grinding to a halt with too much access to the disk at any given time, then more RAM helps. Otherwise it won't. It does nothing to help CPU performance; it just lets the system buffer up more audio clips at a time and improves the speed at which it can stream data from disk (since it can stream more at once, which is more efficient than streaming smaller chunks). Even then you hit a limit to how much data you can process at any given time.

RAM's importance is orthogonal to (but limited by) CPU's importance.

IIRC, Cubase also has disk and RAM performance monitors. Those are more helpful to determine whether you need a RAM upgrade.

Post by **Lunkhead** » Mon Jan 16, 2006 11:44 am

In the PowerPC Apple world, I think a UAD card would probably still be a good investment for somebody looking to run more plug-ins, at this point. I've got a dual 1.8GHz G5 and it gets bogged down if I run more than 2-3 instances of the "nice" reverb plug-in that comes with Cubase. It's surprising. And since I can't realistically upgrade my CPU thanks to the design of my computer, I'm faced with either a total system change which would cost ~$2k, or a $300 PCI card which also comes with its own plug-ins that everybody raves about all the time...