New hardware?

[Berni]

Originally Posted by MBTC

If Chris Kemper wants to go and play with his guitar amps for now I don't know what we can do to pull him back into the synth world to give the Virus product line proper attention unless he sees a direct negative impact to sales of the lackluster integration.

This is very funny & not at the same time. It's bad enough they have only 1 guy on support (poor jorg) but only 1 programmer as well that seems to have left the project like the proverbial rat from the sinking ship. The writing has been on the wall for some time if you care to read it. It's a damn shame if you ask me but you would have to be out of your mind to buy a new virus at this point unless of course you don't care about the TI side of things.

[MBTC]

Well if they really have only one programmer, that's part of the problem right there. That would just mean Kemper is a greedy asshat, as much money as he makes per synth and he can't afford to staff better than this?

Is that confirmed true or speculation about only one guy handling all aspects of code? If true it would also be confirmation of what I said recently about Virus integration not working being a resource allocation problem, just a much more basic problem than I originally imagined (i.e. not even quite a resource *allocation* problem, but one of just not having proper resources at all).

What you said is why I find it so hard to bring myself to do it (buying a new Virus). But I thought most folks were reporting better luck with integration lately, so I thought it improved?

[Berni]

All I know is there have been no updates to the new OS5 since january which brought a whole new bunch of problems with it with only a few enhancements to the previous OS & that took over a year to deliver. If there is only one guy working on it, it's at the weekends.

[feedingear]

If i could harness my gtx570 along with the i72600k and my 16gb of ram, i would be a happy happy man.

[MBTC]

Try the reverb download Tweak posted. I'm going to try it soon, possibly this weekend. I remember it crashing on me a few years ago with an error, but its been patched many times since then and that was inside FLStudio, a DAW that not everyone tests their plugs-in for.

[MBTC]

Here's the other reverb plug-in I tried. It is NVidia-only though:

http://www.liquidsonics.com/home.htm

Supposedly also Nebula 3 Pro, which is a multi-effect plug-in, has CUDA (NVidia) support:

http://www.acustica-audio.com

[TweakHead]

I want a synthesizer that can make full use of my graphics card! Make it 20 times more powerful then Diva!

[MBTC]

I don't see why someone hasn't yet, honestly. Maybe they're worried about building technology that's dependent upon a sole chip vendor like NVidia, but in concept its not too different than something like powercore, only way more advantageous for them since NVidia GPUs are already so prevalent. A lot of people have them and don't even realize it.

The rig I'm typing this on right now has a gtx690 with 4GB of memory on the card! That's more than a lot of folks laptops have for primary RAM! Talk about an under-utilized hardware resource. Nuts that there isn't more audio stuff available for it.

On the other hand, we could be using our GPUs to mine Bitcoins, ultimately putting cash in our pocket for frivolous expenditures like overpriced synth hardware

[TweakHead]

Another thing I failed to mention was oversampling. Higher sample rates prevents aliasing and the so called artifacts noticeable more in high frequencies, but that's also more demanding on the cpu. It's become common to have an option for the amount of oversampling we want to use in software synthesizers, and virtual analogues also include that in their detailed specs. That's also another feature that requires a lot of processing power. The technology is there and it's easy to implement, I think, but isn't pushed to its limits because the developers have to compromise between quality and cpu hit. So as our processors got better, we get a better taste of what can be done with software. The other feature I find to be particularly cpu intensive is unisson. Then there's always multiplying all of this by playing many voices at once, of course.

Read somewhere that our gpus are still working on 32 bit and that 64 would be ideal for high end audio applications. Again, can't even approach if this is true or not.

But do you think it would be possible to have a real high end synthesizer, multi-timbral, with a very high internal sample rate, state of the art filters and all of that running from our graphics card?

[MBTC]

I personally think yes, a lot of the more powerful graphics cards could run multiple instances of mega-synths and FX. Actually three or four years ago I thought this would have been farther along than it is. In truth though, I know very little about the CUDA SDK and I've read it is cumbersome and difficult to program against. I think NVidia would really need to find ways to make audio applications easier to create, although I say all of this without even having taken a close look at CUDA from a programming standpoint (pure speculation).

There is a big disparity in the amount of power across cards. The one I mentioned in this PC (gtx690) is a monster, extremely powerful dual GPU card.. the one I have in my actual music PC is a much more modest low end card (gts450), so there would be a big difference in music making potential of each of those, just as there is a big difference in gaming performance.

I'm not sure about any aspect of GPUs being 32 bit though, or at least not sure what that might refer to, specifically. The bus on some of these NVidia Kepler-based graphics cards is 256 or 256 x 2 in the case of dual GPU cards, and of course both 32 and 64 bit drivers are created for them.

However, I'm sorry to say I'm not holding my breath, because CUDA technology has been available for this type of use for 4-5 years now. The graphics cards have gotten phenomenally faster and more efficient in power usage, however utilization of them for anything but graphics seems to be at a snails pace.

It is promising to see these reverb plug-ins making progress in their development. Reverb is a really CPU-gobbling and commonly used effect.. in fact probably if there was one I would identify to offload to a secondary processing mechanism, that would be the one.