It is time to upgrade my Mac. I typically look at CPU speed and core count; however, I feel like GPU is becoming, or will very soon become, usable for audio plugins. Does anyone have any insight into this topic? Do you think widespread adoption for plugin-processing via GPU is still a ways down the road?
I’d really like to hear from the Cubase devs themselves on this topic, too.
My understanding is that GPUs are not suitable for real time processing. So while they can be utilized for offline processes, such as stem separation, they don’t work well for typical VST plugin duties.
Traditionally, GPUs do not lend themselves to most types of DSP algorithms. The advantage of a GPU is that it can compute data in parallel on a massive scale. Most DSP algorithms though work more in a serial fashion, except reverb and some modulation algorithms. Then there is additional latency moving the data to and from the GPU…
Some years ago the company gpu.audio claimed that they had solved those issues and offered an SDK for adapting audio plugins to the GPU. They even offered some free plugins, although most of them were of the type of algorithms that were suited for parallelization like reverb or modulation, but not e.g. guitar sims, distortions or analog emulations, which tend to be the CPU intensive kind…
The reality was that there was no adaption from the plugin developers. In the beginning, they only supported NVidia cards, which of course limited the market. Some more were added in the following years, but I guess for developers it wasn’t worth the effort and financial investment (buying extra graphic adapters, and especially having even more environments than already to test their plugins for.)
The only plugin from a third party developer that is currently available is MIR from VSL (a massive convolution reverb).
The free plugins from gpu.audio seem to be gone now, and according to their website “The GPU Audio team is now focused on bringing innovation to automotive”.
And in the meantime regular CPUs continue to get more powerful or have more and more cores…
So I don’t think much is gonna happen in the foreseeable future.