[linux-audio-user] newbie q: making a machine

Christian Henz chrhenz at gmx.de
Fri May 23 07:06:01 EDT 2003


On Fri, May 23, 2003 at 09:35:30AM +0100, Daniel James wrote:
> > The fact that you most probably won't be using 3d graphics at the
> > same time as making music doesn't mean that you might not want them
> > for other multi-media purposes
> 
> Sure. I'm guess I'm just lucky enough to own more than one machine. 
> But if you want lots of polygons drawn quickly, you can probably get 
> a complete Sony PS2 for the price of some of these graphics cards.
> 
> Nvidia claims the hardware rendering on the Quadro FX 500 is 
> programmable in a C-like language:
> 

It is called Cg and has been around for some time. It works on any Nvidia card 
with a programmable pipeline (i.e. GeForce3+)...

http://developer.nvidia.com/view.asp?PAGE=cg_main

> How you get the tools for this language, it doesn't say.
> 

Downloads (also sources) for Linux are available there.

Also, this article, "The Future of 3D Graphics" was recently linked from 
Slashdot:

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,3973,1091392,00.asp

Quote:

"Any sort of computation of a collection of data where elements interact with 
other elements with high locality is extremely efficient on a GPU. In fact, 
the GPU can be from 10 to 100 times faster than a Pentium 4 in such situations,
says Kirk. Scientific computations such as linear algebra, Fast Fourier 
Transforms, and partial differential equations can also benefit greatly from 
GPUs. One research group is looking to break the Linpack benchmark world record
using a cluster of 256 PCs with GeForce FXs! Another scenario that surprised 
Kirk was when a development team recently tried to use a GeForce FX CPU to 
perform database key sorting. When coded to take advantage of the parallelism 
and pipelining in the GPU, parallel key sorts and searches can occur much 
faster than using general CPUs, on the order of 4-5x faster than the Pentium 4,
according to Kirk."


cheers,
Christian Henz



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