CUDA & OpenCL for DAWs/Plugins

[fito_88]

i think nebula stuff supports cuda gpus.. iv been having the same question too, im contemplating between wether to buy a cheapo silent 6450 card, or get a Phantom GTX 560 Ti 1GB with cuda but thats like $250 and yet and cant find any informations that justifies buying the phantom

[Red Black]

Here's a CUDA reverb and an OpenCL reverb.

LiquidSonics - Reverberate LE | Convolution Reverb for PC

GPU Impulse Reverb VST | NVidia/ATI GPUs used as DSP for convolution reverb calculation


There's a section on the Liquidsonics website that might help explain why CUDA isn't used much:

Originally Posted by Liquidsonics

Zero latency mode is not supported by the GPU Edition due to a combination of factors including the mechanisms involved with transferring data to and from the GPU being much more efficient with larger blocks, a current requirement to run CUDA VST plug-ins in a separate thread (making larger block processing more efficient) and the lack of coherency in buffering schemes used by various different VST hosts complicating the above issues. It may become more practical to implement this feature in future using newer GPU architectures.

I also asked Sean Costello, the developer behind the amazing Valhalla plug-ins about the possibility of porting his stuff to CUDA:

Originally Posted by Sean Costello

I think the odds of me porting to CUDA are about zero.

The reason for this: GPUs are geared towards massively parallel processing. This is the sort of thing that you see in images, which are essentially NxM arrays of data. Image processing tends to be feedforward, and not reliant on previous outputs of the filters.

Most of the audio processes I work on are based on delays, feedback processes and filters, that sort of thing. This doesn't work well in massively parallel systems. I process audio in parallel whenever I can get away with it, for efficiency, but the fact is that delay lines of different lengths are inherently difficult to parallelize. Feedback doesn't work well with massively parallel systems, unless you have feedback with pretty big blocks, and that tends to lose a lot of the cool aspects of feedback.

Convolution processing (including Nebula) works well with massively parallel processing. Beyond that, I could see GPUs used for other things that work well with lots of parallelism, like modal synthesis. For general audio applications, I don't think that GPUs will prove that useful. I wouldn't mind being proven wrong, as there is a LOT of power in the GPU.

[fito_88]

so CUDA is not working well with audio still then... i guess im buying the cheap 6450 for now