[linux-audio-dev] Re: Using ray tracing cpu for audio synthesis

[Juhana Sadeharju]

>From: David Cournapeau <cournape at enst.fr>
>
>    I think I am not the only one here to have heard about so called '3d 
>ray tracing cpu' (e.g: 
>http://graphics.stanford.edu/papers/rtongfx/rtongfx.pdf

Saarcor have earlier demonstrated their ray tracing graphics chips.
One of the screenshots featured Quake game; ray traced version.
http://graphics.cs.uni-sb.de

People have also coded ray tracers on existing GPUs.

>I wondered if this can be used for audio technology, e.g RT reverbs, 
>etc... Does anyone have an idea about the possible usage of this kind of 
>chips for audio processing ?

If GPU cannot handle audio streams, it could be used to compute
the early reflections for fairly complicated buildings. Only
the reflection taps would be copied back from GPU. Both mirror
and ray tracing methods could be used. The final dense reverberation
should still be computed if mirror and ray tracing generates only
approximation, but that is easier with a lot of reflection taps.

Juhana
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