It"s nice to see some progress in PC audio, but I wish more developers put effort into implementing surround sound effects. I miss the old days of A3D!
I miss my A3d 1.0 card. Getting called a wall hacker because I could hear their foot steps through the walls with precision. Or that time my cousin's computer's bugged out and stopped rendering player models and he still managed to kill 3 people on the other team in a knife fight just by hearing them.
I connected mine to a DAC, external headphone amp, and proper studio headphones. It was one of the only times I could actually hear elevation changes in audio sources. 360 positioning was spot on, as well.
Then the question immediately becomes: can you dedicate the GPU portion of AMD's APUs to this? As soon as you upgrade from the impressive yet limited Vega 11 (or 8) in the new Raven Ridge chips, it would be nice if you could still use the 11 (or 8) CUs for something useful.
Excellent point. It'd be great to run physics and audio on the iGPU, leaving the dGPU to focus on graphics.
If you got a dual GPU card (or identical single GPU cards) and had no iGPU, I wonder if the audio processing could be split 50% between each, or if it has to run all on the same physical GPU.
More than you've got. Each Vega CU can sustain roughly 180 GFLOPS. I'm not entirely clear on Ryzen's fp32 throughput, but let's give them the benefit of the doubt and call it 16 FLO/cycle. So, you're talking about something in the ballpark of 60ish GFLOPS/core.
GPUs are convolution monsters. That's why they're so good at CNNs.
Oops, I see you said 3 GHz. So, change that to 48 GFLOPS/core. In reality, it could be lower. But, the way I read Ryzen's specs, it sounds like they have 2x 128-bit vector add and 2x 128-bit vector mul units.
We’ve updated our terms. By continuing to use the site and/or by logging into your account, you agree to the Site’s updated Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
10 Comments
Back to Article
superunknown98 - Wednesday, February 7, 2018 - link
It"s nice to see some progress in PC audio, but I wish more developers put effort into implementing surround sound effects. I miss the old days of A3D!Revdarian - Thursday, February 8, 2018 - link
you and me both... an Aureal 3d 2.0 was my first and best 3d sound card way back in the day, it had the best headphone positional audio ever.bcronce - Thursday, February 8, 2018 - link
I miss my A3d 1.0 card. Getting called a wall hacker because I could hear their foot steps through the walls with precision. Or that time my cousin's computer's bugged out and stopped rendering player models and he still managed to kill 3 people on the other team in a knife fight just by hearing them.mode_13h - Monday, February 12, 2018 - link
I connected mine to a DAC, external headphone amp, and proper studio headphones. It was one of the only times I could actually hear elevation changes in audio sources. 360 positioning was spot on, as well.nwarawa - Thursday, February 8, 2018 - link
Then the question immediately becomes: can you dedicate the GPU portion of AMD's APUs to this? As soon as you upgrade from the impressive yet limited Vega 11 (or 8) in the new Raven Ridge chips, it would be nice if you could still use the 11 (or 8) CUs for something useful.mode_13h - Monday, February 12, 2018 - link
Excellent point. It'd be great to run physics and audio on the iGPU, leaving the dGPU to focus on graphics.If you got a dual GPU card (or identical single GPU cards) and had no iGPU, I wonder if the audio processing could be split 50% between each, or if it has to run all on the same physical GPU.
palladium - Thursday, February 8, 2018 - link
So how many Ryzen cores (say, at 3GHz) does it take to achieve a similar performance when 8 CUs are "sacrificed" for audio computation?mode_13h - Monday, February 12, 2018 - link
More than you've got. Each Vega CU can sustain roughly 180 GFLOPS. I'm not entirely clear on Ryzen's fp32 throughput, but let's give them the benefit of the doubt and call it 16 FLO/cycle. So, you're talking about something in the ballpark of 60ish GFLOPS/core.GPUs are convolution monsters. That's why they're so good at CNNs.
mode_13h - Monday, February 12, 2018 - link
Oops, I see you said 3 GHz. So, change that to 48 GFLOPS/core. In reality, it could be lower. But, the way I read Ryzen's specs, it sounds like they have 2x 128-bit vector add and 2x 128-bit vector mul units.mode_13h - Monday, February 12, 2018 - link
Their diagram shows 40 Compute Units. I guess that's... Hawaii?