Free GPU-powered FIR Convolution Reverb from GPU Audio

[Larry Shelby]

Get it here

https://earlyaccess.gpu.audio/

[Starship Krupa]

I'm intrigued by what they're trying to do. I've long wondered whether audio software developers could somehow leverage GPU's to offload audio DSP tasks.

If this is possible it could be revolutionary.

The first beta product is a convolution reverb, which seems like a good choice given that those tend to be resource hogs.

[Fleer]

Same here. If they’re making use of the new Mac M1 monster GPUs this might be pretty good. 

[Starship Krupa]

Darn, the early access requires an nVidia 10XX card. Not for me at this time.

[Xoo]

It works fine on an nVidia 1030, which is pretty low powered (nowadays!).  The M1 GPUs may not be as good for this as you might think (compared with an nVidia card).

[kitekrazy1]

3 hours ago, Starship Krupa said:

I'm intrigued by what they're trying to do. I've long wondered whether audio software developers could somehow leverage GPU's to offload audio DSP tasks.

If this is possible it could be revolutionary.

The first beta product is a convolution reverb, which seems like a good choice given that those tend to be resource hogs.

Some developers just need to write better code instead of relying on GPUs.

[telecode 101]

looks very cool. i will check out.

[Brian Walton]

58 minutes ago, telecode 101 said:

looks very cool. i will check out.

Given that few people drop the cash on a current GPU I can understand why developers haven't tried to adopt it.  It only benefits a small subset of an already niche audience 

It's a great idea but I can see the support complications going that route 

Melda has offloaded the graphics part to the GPU for a while.  I wonder if he dabbled with the audio processing part too.  But as mentioned above the key is just making efficient code in the first place and Melda has certainly focused on that 

Edited March 25, 2022 by Brian Walton

[Starship Krupa]

2 hours ago, Paul Young said:

Some developers just need to write better code instead of relying on GPUs.

I think it would be cool to have better code that also makes use of GPU's. Happy fun time! I'm frugal by nature, so I see a processor with all these cores sitting there doing mostly nothing and I wonder what use it could be put to. As I said, it's intriguing. Who knows, their efforts may lead to some other innovation that doesn't require CUDA cores or Kepler architecture or whatever.

3 minutes ago, Brian Walton said:

Melda has offloaded the graphics part to the GPU for a while.  I wonder if he dabbled with the audio processing part too.

Well, as I ran up against, and others have alluded to, one of the issues I suppose would be that not everyone has a GPU that's compatible with their code. There's nothing at all lacking in my 550Ti for the DAW and NLE work that I do on my system. I have little incentive to upgrade, and prices are insane thanks to the crypto rush.

I've experienced the difference between plug-ins coded to take advantage of OpenGL (or whatever) and those that don't. I can be running certain Soundspot FX just fine, but then if I open their pretty UI, I start getting dropouts. Nasty, nasty. Doesn't happen with Meldaproduction, but then their UI's are usually pretty static compared to Soundspot's.

I work on two different systems, and they have two different GPU's. My plug-ins have to run on both of them, so these GPU-enabled FX would also need to come in versions that didn't need a fancy GPU to function. That may be an issue. Like with UAD, you have the ones that use the coprocessors and then the "native" ones.

IK Multimedia MODO Drums won't run on my notebook because its processor doesn't have AVX. Fine, whatever, it's a freebie and I have other drum VSTi's I can use. But I wouldn't want to have that be the case with a fancy thing I paid money for.