Graphics card for heavy audio processing

Post by **irrelevance** » Fri Apr 21, 2006 11:57 pm

Theres been talk of this for some time now but at last it seems that development could be near completion. Check it out : http://www.bionicfx.com/

Post by **irrelevance** » Sun Apr 30, 2006 1:27 am

Niether am I

I'm on a radeon ATI agp at the moment but I'm getting some funny things happening with mouse movements and hiss ie the hiss disapears when I move the mouse. It's only a very tiny hiss, bearly audible so I'm not in a rush to fix but will certainly look into the nvidia.
I wonder how much processing is wasted turning video into audio data? I think I remember reading that these agp cards process at something like 3.4G flops.

dawman · Post by **dawman** » Sun Apr 30, 2006 7:46 am

This product will never see the light of day. This company was to be purchased by NVidia, but they decided that most people would use some form of convolution and have no need for exotic multiple instances of convoluted reverbs. I hear from my sources that BionicFX has been ready for 2 years, but have no money or venture capital.Meanwhile while they wait,DSP boards, and CPU's have evolved more and more each quarter. Their product can never expect to gain anyhthing while sitting idle for so long. I would have loved to see it used for spitting out large sections of audio at different sample rates in real time and such, along with the added convolutions.Asus SLI equipped boards w/ 2 x 512MB 6800GT's would have been sweet. I imagine that someone is just monitoring the website right now to see the amount of interest, which is probably very little as it has been up for 2 years, and by the end of the year we will hear no more about it. Too bad, for I always am interested in any process which frees up the CPU cycles,i.e.Scope/ProTools/Accel.

Strength Through Superior Marketing,

darkrezin · Post by **darkrezin** » Sun Apr 30, 2006 8:01 am

It's a cool idea, but there's already a card based on a video processor, UAD1, which already has some really excellent plugins for it. Due to the possible variables, BionicFX could be a nightmare to set up and to support by the company. Good luck to them though.

Shroomz~> · Post by **Shroomz~>** » Sun Apr 30, 2006 8:28 am

If an imaculately open & essentially perfect piece of 1u rack audio hardware like the Soundart Chameleon can't make it commercially, this shit has no chance, but again, good luck to them.

Shroomz~> · Post by **Shroomz~>** » Sun Apr 30, 2006 8:55 am

Then again, an x86 based 1u rack platform would possibly be more attractive to developers than a 56k one.

HUROLURA · Post by **HUROLURA** » Sun Apr 30, 2006 12:54 pm

x86 solutions still need to run Windows OS at the same time and is not the most efficient solution.

The problem is just the same as using the x86 core to replace a graphic card. Just have a look at theperformance impact on a PC which just use main PC SDRAM as graphic memory.

I do think DSP based solution are much more efficient (the 4 56k-150MHz DSP inside the KS series from novation could achieve the same work as their V-Station running on a 2.5 GHz PC or the same powercore plug-in running on 4x 56k-150Mhz DSP). Just imagine what you would get with DSP running at 2.5 Ghz !!!

JL · Post by JL » Sun Apr 30, 2006 5:14 pm

Just imagine what you would get with DSP running at 2.5 Ghz !!!

Something similar to Korg Oasys.

Post by **irrelevance** » Sun Apr 30, 2006 9:12 pm

I hadn't realised the UAD1 was based on video processor technology. The SOS review at the time said the the company was being very guarded about the kind of processor used, stating only that it was neither Sharc nor Motorola.

symbiote · Post by **symbiote** » Mon May 01, 2006 11:35 am

There was a very detailed posts about the UAD technology by one of the main engineers once, really interesting. I think it was on the official UAD forum. Worth tracking it down if you're interested, it's a really nice read.