| DSP's are really optimized for that application, and an instruction set that's very efficient for things like filters, reverbs, etc. Some of the hardware reverbs have a reverb-intensive instruction set - Lexicon, for example. And the reverb gets all of that processing power.
A plugin designer has to figure out how much processing power that he/she can use up, and stay within that bound. It doesn't matter if YOU have the biggest, fastest, computer. It doesn't matter that YOUR meter never goes about 25% while running 20 reverbs concurrently. What matters is that on the designer's target computer, that was the amount of time they could spend running the algorithm, so it would run on some target computer that's much slower than yours. Once the algorithm is set that way, running it on a faster machine does not result in a more lush reverb. It does not magically add more taps or stages to any of the internal reverb delays and comb filters. It simply finishes its work earlier.
My day job is writing software for embedded systems. I routinely pull things off with a 40 MHz 16-bit processor that people dream of pulling off on a PC of any speed. That is because the hardware on the chip I use is optimized for the applications that I am writing software for. But I can't get it to do emails or browse Gearslutz. |