Think that Nvidia GPUs are just for playing games on, or for being used for GPGPU in the HPC field? Think again. Nvidia’s blog is reporting on several talks from their GPU Technology Conference that they held in San Jose, CA. One of those talks was on the topic of using Nvidia’s GPUs for processing sound, specifically, surround sound.
In a talk for audio professionals, Nicolas Tsingos, of Dolby Laboratories, described the inroads GPUs are making in 3D audio rendering and simulations. His presentation, “Interactive 3D Audio Rendering Systems” covered the ways that GPUs can be used in audio processing and in creating simulations of the way acoustics sound in three-dimensional environments.
Starting with an overview of GPUs and parallelism, Tsingos showed how he and other acoustical researchers have applied many-core processors to acoustical simulation challenges, and then shared optimization secrets they’ve learned along the way. They have found that, depending on the scenario, GPUs can accelerate processing speeds by 2x to 300x versus using CPUs on their own.
