[LAD] Has anyone ever played a plugin in realtime ... [related to:] hard realtime performance synth

[Joshua Boyd]

On Sun, Feb 07, 2010 at 12:18:51AM +0100, Jens M Andreasen wrote:

<snip example of sse assembly versus Cuda>

> In which one of those two codepaths would you like to spend your spare
> time? Which one looks the most civilized? Just wondering ...

<snip a bit more>

> [OK... That might be enough CUDA advocacy for tonight? :-D]

The cuda stuff is impressive, and may well be the way of the future.
However, I don't think it is generally right for linux audio until I can
write cuda code (or a similar language) and have it run on Nvidia cards, 
ATI cards, at least one card using open source drivers, and plain CPUs
using SSE (and/or threading).

It seems that any quarter now, OpenCL may be close to meeting the
qualifications I set (use with Nvidia, ATI, free drivers, and CPU only),
however, I don't believe that the OpenCL language is as nice or easy to
use as Cuda.  Is there any work on an open source clone of Cuda?

Obviously any individual programmer can do what they want, but I believe
that as a community, GPUs are not yet ready for us to be using them, not
strictly for technical reasons, but primarily for freedom and
interoperability reasons.  I am really eager to see this change though.