On Fri, Feb 13, 2004 at 01:53:50 +0100, Tim Goetze wrote: > >Hear hear. I think that GL accelration is a (potentially) important > >optimisation for audio apps - it saves a lot of cache and memory bandwidth > >that can be better used number-crunching audio. > > i'm a bit skeptical about this GL + audio business. over the years, > these splendid 3D accelerator cards have 'improved' to the point of > being one of the noisiest parts in a system, and consuming serious > wattage.
I'm only talking about doing flat-projection bitmap layering and so on, nothing onerous. I bought a cheap, fanless nvidia card recently and there are free drivers for the low-end ATI cards (which are plently fast enough). Matrox have just release a card designed for audio that has no fans (due to downclocked 3d processor) and lots of acceleration on all heads. > and if you design your application around it, a system that does > GL in software will suffer big time from the cache, memory bandwidth > *and* CPU cycle hit. i've seen some simple GL-enabled applications > freeze software GL systems to a virtual standstill because it never > dawned on the author that this has to be taken into account. I'm not thinking of a 3D UI, just using GL to accelerate 2D. > i do agree that GL is a potentially important optimization. i don't > expect the potential to manifest itself within the next cople of years > though. :) Right, well in the meantime im doing it as optional - eg. I have an alpha version of meterbridge which can use GL - if you have it, it's massivly more efficient, it looks better and you can resize the windows. - Steve
