UAD DSP Accelerator - Does it help non-UAD plugins?

[Robert Bone]

OK, so I saw a link today, at Sweetwater, for a UAD PCIe card quad-core DSP accelerator, that also comes with some of their plugins, and there is an additional freebie collection of other plugins that come with purchase of the card.  Here is the link to that product, if anyone wants to review it to help answer my question:

https://www.sweetwater.com/store/detail/UAD2Quad--universal-audio-uad-2-quad-core-pcie-dsp-accelerator 

SO, my question about this accelerator is - will this somehow also help NON-UAD plugins?  If so, it seems like a pretty helpful expansion card for my computer, to take the burden of effects processing off of my CPU.

I guess it still could be cool, but only when I would use the UAD plugins it comes with, plus the freebie ones they give if I buy the unit.

Thanks for any help in understanding this well enough for me to make an informed decision on this purchase.  I don't know how Cakewalk would know to use this thing for any effects processing, and my uneducated guess on the whole thing is that the UAD plugins may contain code that checks the presence of any such available DSP accelerator, and then routes the processing requests to the accelerator.  I am hoping it can handle non-UAD plugins, as well.

Bob Bone

[Alan Tubbs]

As far as I know, no.  The uad accelerator uses shark chips to run their emulations.  They don’t drain your computer cpu.

[Tom B]

+1 on what Alan said.     In addition ...

The UAD plugins show up and operate just like any other VST plugin in the DAW.  The UAD drivers handle the connectivity between the DAW and UAD hardware. I've been using UAD  PCIe boards with Cakewalk for years, and it works fine.  

As you likely know, the UAD plugins can only run using the UAD hardware (e.g. UAD PCIe, Apollo, etc.).  Non-UAD plugins don't run on the UAD hardware.   

There is a limit to the number of plugins which can run simultaneously on a UAD board.  I have a QUAD PCIe and occasionally hit the limit.   You can always bounce or disable plugins as needed.    Here's a link at UAD with a table of DSP usage for the plugins:

https://help.uaudio.com/hc/en-us/articles/215262223-UAD-2-DSP-Chart

Hope that helps.

[Starship Krupa]

A UAD processor card will do nothing for a plug-in that is not specially coded to make use of the UAD card. That is what I think the OP wanted to know.

Many plug-in companies make two versions of the same plug-in, a version that will use the UAD processor and a version that just uses CPU processing like everything else ("native").

Questions I'd ask myself: is my system running out of muscle now? If so, is my 7 hundy best spent here or on some other hardware like an SSD or more RAM? All that coprocessor does or can ever do is lift some of your system's FX burden.

They sure are nice. Dedicated, purpose designed and built hardware to process your signal is very sweet. I don't know how much or even if the UAD versions of plug-ins are different, but programmers can be more extravagant when they know that there's a whole dedicated chip for them to play with.

[Kev]

On 3/31/2019 at 4:36 AM, Starship Krupa said:

...Many plug-in companies make two versions of the same plug-in, a version that will use the UAD processor and a version that just uses CPU processing like everything else ("native")...

I was not aware of this. Can you provide some examples.

[Starship Krupa]

brainworx bx_saturator and bx_subfilter and the guitar amp sims.

Softube Tonelux tilt EQ, Sonnox Dynamic EQ, Antares Auto-Tune....

....to name a few that are available in both versions.

 

[Kev]

On 4/2/2019 at 2:05 PM, Starship Krupa said:

brainworx bx_saturator and bx_subfilter and the guitar amp sims.

Softube Tonelux tilt EQ, Sonnox Dynamic EQ, Antares Auto-Tune....

....to name a few that are available in both versions.

Thanks. I don't have any of those. Hence my ignorance on the subject.