Cakewalk and Cuda Cores

[RexRed]

I have an I9 CPU and it handles 'anything' I throw at it in Cakewalk.

I was just wondering, in theory, could Cakewalk someday make use of Cuda cores?

This is not necessarily a feature request because Cakewalk performs very nicely with my current 12 core, 24 thread CPU.

I just noticed how much better my dual graphics cards render and when I throw my CPU into the 3D rendering mix in Daz Studio mix it slows things down actually.

Cakewalk is really one of the very few apps on my PC that actually uses all of my CPU cores.

On my most demanding songs it barely ever peaks above 3% on all cores.

Can audio data benefit from Cuda cores? Just curious if anyone here knows the answer.

Thanks in advance.

Edited March 15, 2020 by RexRed

[scook]

I doubt much has changed since http://forum.cakewalk.com/FindPost/3675436

[RexRed]

Thanks Scook for searching out and answer for this question.

My old PC had only 4 cores and my CPU bogged down on a bandwidth threshold on nearly every song.

There are so many variables, including hard disk read and write speeds and effects needing a lot of processing.

Cakewalk does have a lot of geometry that already utilizes the graphics cores.

I just wonder about this and if shifting a few more resources over to the graphics engine might make sense. 

I have two 1080tis that one of them probably sits idle.

As for some people having ATI and some Nvidia, it could be an option that is turned on but does not have to be compulsory. 

Some of Cakewalk's data could probably benefit from the type of processing that Cuda cores are really proficient at. Nvidia would probably help write an engine that addresses audio processing much like they have done with Iray.

I don't understand much more than that about the subject and even my largest projects only take minutes to render down so it is not a huge issue.

It is mostly the playback and latency that interests me in this subject.

It does seem that a lot of Cakewalk computing is using the processor and how much the GPUS are being used is not something I am an expert at but the GPU having to paint the waveforms in realtime is probably not a small task.

Audio latency is a real issue and if the GPUs could be incorporated into the mix to address this, I don't know, maybe these Cuda cores could be a help in this regard...

Wouldn't this also make Cakewalk the first DAW to ever use GPU cores for audio?

Edited March 15, 2020 by RexRed
Edits in grammar

[scook]

AFAIK, CUDA is not a solution for audio latency issues. The major sources of audio latency are

• The time needed by audio drivers to shuttle data between the audio interface and the DAW (audio buffer setting)
• The time needed for some plug-ins to see into the future in order to react incoming data (plug-in delay compensation)

 

Quote

Wouldn't this also make Cakewalk the first DAW to ever use GPU cores for audio?

Although CUDA has been around for over 10 years, It would not surprise me if this were the case. . Not sure how much a DAW would benefit from it.

[Bill Phillips]

On 3/14/2020 at 4:24 PM, RexRed said:

I have an I9 CPU and it handles 'anything' I throw at it in Cakewalk.

I was just wondering, in theory, could Cakewalk someday make use of Cuda cores?

This is not necessarily a feature request because Cakewalk performs very nicely with my current 12 core, 24 thread CPU.

I just noticed how much better my dual graphics cards render and when I throw my CPU into the 3D rendering mix in Daz Studio mix it slows things down actually.

Cakewalk is really one of the very few apps on my PC that actually uses all of my CPU cores.

On my most demanding songs it barely ever peaks above 3% on all cores.

Can audio data benefit from Cuda cores? Just curious if anyone here knows the answer.

Thanks in advance.

RedFox, I'm not sure about Cuda Cores, but I am sure that some VST plugins use OpenGL, particularly for sophisticated graphical audio data displays. In my case my CPU is an older i7-6850K with 6 cores and 12 threads. I had an older AMD R7-250 video card. I use the iZotope Music Production Suite which has, what I consider, an awesome user interface using lots of sophisticated graphics. I've also verified that iZotope plugins use OpenGL.

With my existing R7-250 video card I would get lots of pops and cracks anytime I opened certain iZotope plugins. Opening several iZotope plugins and interacting with the graphic displays would cause playback to stop even at the highest audio interface buffer size. I could see that the problem wasn't driving up or overloading my CPU and decided to upgrade my graphics card to a RX 580 to make more OpenGL processing capacity available for iZotope and any other processes that could use it. The result was a night and day improvement allowing me to drastically reduce audio interface buffer size in some situations and allowing Cakewalk to use more of my CPU's processing capacity.

Here's a thread to the SoundonSound forum I used to get advice in addressing the OpenGL problem. The advice I received helped me understand the problem and select a replacement graphics card.

At the end of the thread, I posted a summary of my conclusions from the graphics card upgrade. Hope you can open the link and read the thread. And I hope it's useful to you.

Edited March 15, 2020 by Bill Phillips
Clarification