11 Dec
2012
11 Dec
'12
12:25 a.m.
On Tue, December 11, 2012 3:32 am, Bill Gribble wrote:
On Tue, 2012-12-11 at 02:56 +1100, Patrick Shirkey
wrote:
It's also handy for rendering video graphics and ffmpeg/libavcodec has
some support for accelerated processing too. Blender and Ardour make an
incredibly powerful combination but the complete toolset is just
incredible with a tightly honed cluster.
On Mon, December 10, 2012 10:42 pm, Bill Gribble
wrote:
We have several headless machines running GPU's with thousands of
processing units available. Much more power than the first "Lord of the
Rings" movie was made with.
Good stuff to have available! Even on a normal laptop with external GPU
chipset and the builtin Intel one too there's a pretty powerful idle
processor. That's why I started getting interested. Also, I penciled
out a hardware setup that would allow a laptop to add external PCI
graphics cards for this purpose, seems like a great choice for
convolution reverbs, long FIR filters for linear-phase EQ, etc.
I mention interactions because there are a few
commercial
GPU-accelerated audio plugins for Windows (convolution reverb was all I
could find, can't remember the name offhand), and I spent some time
scraping forums at the manufacturer, gearslutz, etc for information
about real-world performance. The reports were that the latency for
executing OpenCL kernels was pretty unpredictable, and seemed to be
related to resource allocation by the desktop OS. Not an issue in your
case, nor in any case where you have a dedicated chip (or render farm)
for your own purposes.
We are attempting to push the limits of the software and hardware as much
as possible. One of my priorities is workflow integration. Figuring out
where the holes in the system are and looking at ways to seal them to
increase usability.
--
Patrick Shirkey
Boost Hardware Ltd