September 3, 2004

Audio processing technology...

Very cool "out of the box" thinking on audio signal processing technology. From an article at Tom's Hardware comes this story: bq. Nvidia's graphic cards may have much more to offer than simply drawing pixels on the screen: A startup company has found a way to translate audio signals into graphics, run them through the graphics card and overcome a common issue of limited audio effect processing performance in computers. bq. It is not unusual that professional music artists run into performance barriers even with the most powerful computers today. Multi-track recording still is a challenging and sometimes frustrating task. James Cann from BionicFX in Massachusetts however noticed that audio processing task does not have to happen just in the CPU. His Audio Video Exchange technology (AVEX) converts digital audio in graphics data and then performs effect calculations using the 3D architecture of Nvidia GPUs. Compared to the capability of just six GFlops of a typical CPU, Nvidia's chips can reach more than 40 GFlops, according to Cann. Very cool - when using the computer for recording, you don't need to refer to the video very much and offloading the audio signal processing to the video CPU speeds up the process a lot allowing for more complex processing algorithms. The company's website has more info and samples: BionicFX Posted by DaveH at September 3, 2004 1:11 PM