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From: hsyq8xg on 11 Apr 2008 10:18
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 !!
From: Dr.White on 11 Apr 2008 11:33

<hsyq8xg(a)gmail.com> wrote in message
news:fce69f18-a0e4-4cba-acec-1db1f8d6a4a6(a)s39g2000prd.googlegroups.com...
> 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.


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