Silent_Buddha
Legend
It's a reasonable gamble of course since:
- AMD really wants compute to be a thing used by everyone.
- Nvidia has a business based on compute essentially. ( Titan is a reduced compute version of more compute heavy cards )
- Every GPU these days has at least some compute around to play with.
- XB1 also has compute.
So GPGPU isn't the easiest thing to program for but there are lot of people looking into it because it's ubiquitous and it can solve problems. Cerny is also betting that there will be middleware folks that may find compute a profitable niche. That would be more speculative but definitely a win for GPGPU if they did.
It is somewhat interesting, however, that AMD specifically included an Audio DSP block to support audio in their GPUs rather than using compute for anything audio related in games. And from what Dave said, it was mainly due to synchronization issues rather than contention for GPU compute resources.
Meaning that it's likely far more complicated than one would assume to do properly synchronized game audio through GPU compute than otherwise (CPU for example). With audio manipulation programs that isn't gong to be an issue as there is nothing you have to synchronize it with. With video players, again, it isn't an issue as you can delay your video stream in order to synchronize with the audio. For games, you can't delay each frame of the game to synchronize with the audio.
As well, while much time and money has been invested to do audio manipulation through CUDA for Nvidia hardware, that doesn't apply to game audio. And it isn't as if Nvidia or developers are afraid to use GPU compute for non-graphics rendering purposes. Nvidia have been pushing hard for GPU compute to be used in games whenever possible, so them avoiding it for game audio is fairly conspicuous.
What isn't known, of course, is whether Sony have included any modifications to the the GPU block with an eye towards solving that problem.
Regards,
SB