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Originally Posted by Marsdy
1. I was wondering about chip sharing on the new HDX cards. On TDM systems there are some "chip hog" plug-ins. For example, an instance of Virus Indigo uses 13% of one chip, the remainder of the chip's capacity being unusable for anything else. Not even another instance of Virus Indigo can use the remainder. If I only use a single instance of a McDSP plug-in like Retro EQ in a mix, it uses 18% of one chip, the remaining 82% is then unusable for anything other than another McDSP plug-in.
With HDX having fewer chips than say an HD3 system, are "chip hog" plug-ins going to have a bigger impact on overall DSP capacity? I'm thinking a few greedy plug-ins might eat into the advantage HDX has over my HD3 system because fewer DSP chips are available per system. Maybe you could comment on how chip sharing is managed on the HDX cards? Or is this down to the plug-in developers?
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AAX is a multi-shell environment, so all plug-ins share. It isn't an additional option like it was with TDM. Turns out this is very difficult to do in a general way, but I think we've nailed it. There are some circumstances where plug-ins will hog a chip right now because of non-deterministic resource contentions on the chip, but these cases are rare. And these outliers as far as chip resource usage tend to be the huge plug-ins, which would likely end up taking most of a chip anyway. I think you'll see these chips being packed much tighter than the legacy TDM system was capable of. Please let us know if you don't, and we can take an additional look at how to optimize the allocations.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Marsdy
2. Will AAX plug-ins read user preset files created by their TDM equivalent?
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Yes, if the plug-in developer sets up their plug-ins to be compatible. All of our AAX plug-ins convert seamlessly between their legacy and AAX counterparts. This includes conversion of types when you switch decks, settings saves in the session, presets, etc. This was actually a pretty tough compromise to make in the design, but we're not in the business of pure technical research. We understand that you guys switch between systems and we needed to make this transition as painless as possible.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Marsdy
3. Are we likely to see many DSP AAX virtual instruments? If so, could an AAX VI running on an HDX card stream samples off disk?
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Good question. I think that ultimately depends on the third party companies. There are a couple things that would need to happen. Your actual processing code for your instrument has to be pretty disentangled from the rest of your plug-in. You'd want the VI to be pretty deterministic in how much CPU it will take, which could be tough in many cases. And lastly, we have much less memory on the TI chips than in the host, so large samplers are probably not an appropriate fit for the DSP. If I had to guess, I'd say we might see synths someday on the DSP, which would be cool. Samplers, I'd guess not, but you never know. We're certainly willing to collaborate with the plug-in developers on creative ways to make all of these things possible...
Oh, and to answer your second question... not really. You can read the samples off disk from the host side of your plug-in and push them down to the DSPs just in time, but you'd have to really analyze whether this is a good use of the DSP and the CPU.
Dave