[linux-audio-user] Audio Processing on Your Graphics Card?

[Steve Harris]

On Fri, Sep 03, 2004 at 06:24:40PM -0700, Malcolm Baldridge wrote:
> 
> > "BionicFX has announced Audio Video EXchange (AVEX), a technology that 
> > transforms real-time audio into video and performs audio effect
> > processing on the GPU of your NVIDIA 3D video card, the latest of 
> > which are apparently capable of more than 40 gigaflops of processing
> > power compared to less than 6 gigaflops on Intel and AMD CPUs." 
> 
> Hrm, I wouldn't call those FLOPs, since the operations aren't discrete
> floating point operations under direct control.  Those graphics primitives
> are extremely limited in scope to 3D transformations and various
> median/anisotropic filtering "calculations".  Remember also, that destroying
> information is a deliberately permitted aspect of these "calculations". 
> None of the GPU operations are required to be reversible.

I dont know that much about the processors in GPUs, but I think there are
two kinds of instruction sets, pixel shaders and texture shaders. One is
very limited and one has a resaonable subset of C + libm. I can't remember
which is more capable, but its the set standardised in OGL 2.

- Steve