HDX vs. Accel DSP usage comparsions please

[digidesigner]

As HDX is shipping now, would be cool if users would post some comparsions of DSP usage. I am a HD4 user, so I'm currently having as many DSP's available as it would be with HDX2.

There are reports under PT10 section where people are running only one Revibe per chip on HDX compared to two that run on an Accel chip. So for me that is not too much to the direction of "up to five times more DSP"

Other real life comparsions that would show what is really happening would be highly appreciated!

[Jamshied]

I'd be curious as well to see how the cards compare.

Looking at Avid's own specs (http://www.avid.com/US/products/Pro-...specifications), it would seem that one HDX card (18 x 350 Mhz = 6300) is a little faster than three Accel cards (3 x 9 x 200 MHz = 5400), but if the HDX card is working on 32-bit (rather than 24-bit) files, the three Accel cards would have the edge (by about 14%). But these are numbers, and what actually happens in a session will undoubtedly be different.

Has anyone done real-world comparisons?

[Emcha_audio]

It all will fall with the optimization of the plugins. Apparently it's easier to optimize the plugin for the hdx chips architecture and on card ram than it was with the hd accel card. Time will tell.

[Bentley Ferrari]

The real pull for developers here will be the power the new hardware gives them:

(1) As always, they'll take this as an opportunity to improve on the existing stable of plugins. That means they'll be much better but use more DSP.

(2) And they'll build entirely new plugins that the old hardware could never have supported.

The next couple of years could be pretty exciting.

It will level off, though, once we reach a point where a a fully loaded HDX system can manage a plugin count roughly equivalent to the kind of plugin counts we get with a fully loaded HD Accel system.

That's the way its always gone anyway.

[Danny Caccavo]

From what I understand they are still catching up on optimizations (read-ReVibe), but on others they are way ahead. Of the top of my head I do know that with HEAT you can get about 2 1/2 times more instances than the Accel DSP - but since there are 18 DSPs per card that sorta turns into 5x more powerful in terms of the card. I expect that they'll be catching up......

[M2E]

How many of the new HDX cards can you have at one time?
If there is 18 chips that's cool as, the Accel cards have 9 chips.
So if it's 3x to 5x times better, that's cool as well but, if you have an HD6 or HD7, it wouldn't matter really. Only thing is that, they are not updating the old system after PT10HD. That sucks but, I have to be honest, if PT10 is great and the bugs are gone then, I would just update to that.
I don't see the real need to update to an whole new card system.

Anyway, that's another thread, just want to know, how many cards max, can you have on the new HDX system?

Thanx,

Marc

[M2E]

Originally Posted by M2E

How many of the new HDX cards can you have at one time?
If there is 18 chips that's cool as, the Accel cards have 9 chips.
So if it's 3x to 5x times better, that's cool as well but, if you have an HD6 or HD7, it wouldn't matter really. Only thing is that, they are not updating the old system after PT10HD. That sucks but, I have to be honest, if PT10 is great and the bugs are gone then, I would just update to that.
I don't see the real need to update to an whole new card system.

Anyway, that's another thread, just want to know, how many cards max, can you have on the new HDX system?

Thanx,

Marc

Nevermind, found the answer. 3 cards are max.
So the cards are 5x more powerful then 1 HD Accel Card.
I think I'll wait til 64bit comes out as they may charge again for upgrading and I'll have to pay again. ;(

Thanx

[PaulV]

A max of 3 HDX cards is supported currently, with more supported in the future. (More will work, but it's not recommended currently.)

BTW, the math adding up the clock speeds of the DSP's doesn't quite reflect the performance of the chips. The DSP's on the HDX can execute up to 8 instructions per clock, so there's up to an 8x speed factor in there on top of it, but it really depends on the plug-in in question, and how much it's been tuned. (The Accel's DSP's only executed one instruction per clock.) Also, 32 bit vs 24 bit doesn't affect the speed of processing, because the DSPs are 32-bit processors (they shovel 32 bits at a time).

Here are a few approximate instance count and improvement factors comparing an HDX card to an HD Accel card. These are the number of instances of each of these that will fit on an HDX card, and how that number compares with an Accel card.

Plug-in        #/HDX   HDX vs Accel
---------------------------
EQIII 7-Band     1602    12.1x
EQ III 1-Band    2376     5.7x
Impact            432     2.9x
HEAT             1548     5.7x
Smack             162     4.0x
Dyn3 Comp/Lim    1296    10.0x
Reverb One         72     5.5x
Revibe             18     2.3x
BF-76             504     7.6x

That's a just a random sampling, taken before we released, so the numbers may have changed a little, but not by much.

Also, we're continuing to optimize and tune the system, so you can expect these numbers to increase in a future release.

[Firechild]

Thanks Paul !

[phatbeatstudio]

A HD4 rig will come nowhere close to a HDX2 not even in the same ball park
HDX is marketed as better than HD3 so if its better HDX2 should be HD 6 maybe 7 if you had HDX2 then you could get another cpu put the cards 1 per cpu and you would have a little less DSP than you have now on each computer but twice the native power. If your not a major studio this should more than be enough for almost anything unless you work for Disney or something. Thats what I would do
In HD2 I was always outa DSP in HDX somehow it seems I have as much DSP left as I used to use. No numbers just limited experience.