Does Pro Tools Use OpenCL?

[25ghosts]

Originally Posted by JFreak

Yep, but OpenCL is different. It means you could drop normal calculations for GPU to process

you can compute meters etc with OpenCL just as you can calculate an effect via OpenGL

The two layers (GL/CL) are though diff. in nature and both serve their own purpose.

Lots of info about such : http://www.khronos.org

[DaveTremblay]

Originally Posted by 25ghosts

AFAIK PT uses the GPU a lot. For drawing and moving stuff. Meters etc.. That I think is OpenGL... Which is a LOT faster than doing it on the CPU.

If AVID were to utilize OpenCL it would immediately void any need of purchasing an HDx card. So I can fully understand why they dont ;-)

Aside from that - the HDx cards guarantees DSP Power - with OpenCL you;ll have to fight for it, if lots are using !

We definitely use the GPU for drawing and stuff like that, but it really isn't a great processor for reliable, low latency audio.

We played around with this a while back and found out several interesting things about OpenCl and Audio. These are all total generalizations, but I'll share anyway.

1) OpenCL is not very deterministic. You package data up, throw it up to the GPU and wait for it to come back... Eventually... We had to run really large audio buffers to not constantly glitch. And just try to open another application...

2) The GPU cores get their power from massive parallelism. That amount of parallelism is difficult to fully utilize in audio networks or plug-ins that require any sort of internal feedback or serialization.

3) OpenCL code is definitely something you have to write custom code for. You can't just build C/C++ code and run it on the cores. So effects and such would have to be entirely redesigned and rewritten to run on those cores.

And please note, I'm just talking about audio processing above. There may be other uses for OpenCL that make a ton of sense in Pro Tools...

Right now, the biggest win of using a higher power graphics card is if you use the new Video Engine.

Dave

[KPereira]

With the enable GPU for video playback setting available in PT11, what exactly is being allocated to the GPU? If using a Blackmagic card for video output, is there still a benefit to using this setting? Also, is there any benefit to having a second GPU as in Resolve? Are there specific cards that are optimized for AVE/PT11?