Re: OpenAL Shaders

On Wed, 2010-01-27 at 11:40 -0500, Jason Daly wrote:
> It's come up from time to time on the list (check the archives), but 
> hasn't really gone anywhere, probably because of the lack of hardware 
> vendor support that you mentioned.

Yes, figures.

> Over the past years it seems that interest (at least in the gaming
> and 
> simulation community) in dedicated audio processing hardware has
> waned 
> considerably, despite the efforts of Creative and their (increasingly 
> slim) competitors.  All of the audio talks I've been to recently
> focus 
> on software solutions, using a spare core for audio processing, using 
> vector instructions, etc, and only focusing on built-in audio
> hardware 
> because that's all you can expect the consumer to have.  I wish it 
> weren't this way (I still have a Creative card myself), but it's
> pretty 
> much undeniable now.

It's funny, in a way. A decade or more ago, in some sense, sound cards
were actually better and had their own dedicated processors before they
started to get watered down requiring the host CPU.

> I suppose you could look into implementing an audio "shading"
> language 
> on a GPU (using CUDA or OpenCL), but I'd be worried about round-trip 
> latency.   CUDA/OpenCL work great for batch processing (multiple 
> operations on large data sets), but not so much for low-latency, 
> real-time stuff, (at least that's what I've heard, I don't have much 
> personal experience).  Not to mention that doing sound rendering on a 
> graphics card is just wrong...  :-)
> 
> --"J" 

I'm like you in that I see using the GPU for anything other than
graphics as a technically clever solution, but really inelegant and
conceptually peculiar.

It could be possible that, say, OpenAL Soft, could spearhead an effort
to have a shader extension (the first shader interface for GL was an
extension as well). The shaders would be software executed for now, and
as we start to flaunt the possibilities through demos, hardware vendors
(e.g. Creative most importantly), might eventually feel encouraged in
implementing support in their drivers.

-- 
Kip Warner -- Software Developer
President & CEO Kshatra Corp.
OpenPGP encrypted/signed mail preferred
http://www.thevertigo.com

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