RSX Audio?

[DeanoC]

DeanoC - have you guys looked at the fmod stuff at all? They claim to be developping a version for Cell on their website...

Serge

We've chatted with fmod and CRI about audio.

 

[DeanoC]

I've touched on this before also, and it's not hard to see that a 3.2 GHz processor (the SPE) with 128 x 128-bit registers, and 256 KB of localized memory is overkill for just sound processing in a game. One quarter (one quarter of the processing, registers, and localized memory) of a SPE's total resources is plenty of power for sound processing, and the rest of the SPE could be used for something else.

Nope, we are allocating an entire SPU for sound.

A typical game level would have no more than 5 to 20 MB of sound data, and the SPE would have no problems dealing with such an amount of data, and processing it.

Audio budget of a level is more like 300Mb+ of audio, excluding music.

 

[breez]

Couldn't an SPE be used for some very nice environmental audio effects etc? That requires some real processing power rather than just mixing together few audio streams

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Nope, we are allocating an entire SPU for sound.
Audio budget of a level is more like 300Mb+ of audio, excluding music.

Next-gen audio, here we come!

 

[Titanio]

Audio budget of a level is more like 300Mb+ of audio, excluding music.

o_0

Is that the size on the disc?

 

[Edge]

Nope, we are allocating an entire SPU for sound.

Cool! Is that because of a need, or because you guys are really pushing the envalope?

Audio budget of a level is more like 300Mb+ of audio, excluding music.

Bits? Like roughly 40 MBytes? If so, that higher than what I expected.

 

[DeanoC]

Cool! Is that because of a need, or because you guys are really pushing the envalope?



Bits? Like roughly 40 MBytes? If so, that higher than what I expected.

Bytes before compression...

 

[Carl B]

What is this audio stuff they're putting in RSX? Is it just a DAC or does it actually do audio processing? The question is why RSX and not Cell? I imagine the Cell have more than enough juice to do audio processing right?

It is Cell. The RSX reference is not a reference to the GPU, but to a 3D audio solution.

RSX Audio

@Deano: Looking forward to some nice audio!

 

[RavenFox]

Wow very cool Deano.

 

[Ken2012]

Off topic, but wasn't the SGI graphics subsystem (name?) in Nintendo64 used for certain audio processing?

Simply put, if you were to use a modern programmable GPU (in this case RSX) to do audio stuff, what would be the obvious drawbacks?

 

[Titanio]

Simply put, if you were to use a modern programmable GPU (in this case RSX) to do audio stuff, what would be the obvious drawbacks?

The hit to your graphics potential would be the most obvious, I'd have thought.

But again, references to "RSX Audio" have nothing to do with PS3 RSX..

 

[Ken2012]

The hit to your graphics potential would be the most obvious, I'd have thought.

OK, what about multi-GPU? Would it be possible (if not necessarily feasible) to throw audio onto a second video card/core in a certain situation? Apologies in advance for my confused n00bness here, but in light of the 'GPGPU' experimentation going on, could this be something that could possibly be looked into?

But again, references to "RSX Audio" have nothing to do with PS3 RSX..

Of course. Not that I twigged on to that at first sight of the thread, mind

 

[DeanA]

But again, references to "RSX Audio" have nothing to do with PS3 RSX..

It's on that PS3 DevStation agenda because it *is* related to PS3's RSX. It's not discussing a pre-1999 sound system for the PC..

I'd have thought this would have been pretty clear.. but these forums have a habit of dragging threads into 'odd' areas..

Dean

 

[Shifty Geezer]

I'd have thought this would have been pretty clear.. but these forums have a habit of dragging threads into 'odd' areas..

In fairness, I think there was lots of reason not to think they were talking about audio on the RSX, given the talk of audio on Cell, and expectations as to what RSX is. If we don't do audio on a G70 in the PC, why do so in PS3...

This raises plenty of questions. Does RSX have fancy audio hardware? If so, why the change from previous Sony talk of audio being done on Cell? Is it just audio using standard PS and VS on standard pipes? Could it be PS2 hardware on RSX being used for audio?

Rather than blame the forum for getting things wrong, blame Sony for not providing enough info for people to make sensible guesses!

 

[nAo]

uh uh

 

[one]

In fairness, I think there was lots of reason not to think they were talking about audio on the RSX, given the talk of audio on Cell, and expectations as to what RSX is. If we don't do audio on a G70 in the PC, why do so in PS3...

This raises plenty of questions. Does RSX have fancy audio hardware? If so, why the change from previous Sony talk of audio being done on Cell? Is it just audio using standard PS and VS on standard pipes? Could it be PS2 hardware on RSX being used for audio?

Rather than blame the forum for getting things wrong, blame Sony for not providing enough info for people to make sensible guesses!

A blast from the past :smile:
http://www.beyond3d.com/forum/showthread.php?t=7478

 

[j^aws]

NVIDIA Shows First Public Demonstration of New OpenMAX IL Open Standard for Streaming Media Portability

...
The demonstration will show a prototype OpenMAX IL implementation executing on an NVIDIA GoForce 3D handheld graphics processing unit (GPU) to create a flexible, accelerated streaming media pipeline to input, decode, and display an MPEG-4 video stream with fully synchronized audio at full frame rate—an industry first. Through using OpenMAX IL, different codecs may be easily inserted into the pipeline, or the configuration of the processing pipeline can be easily changed with full media component and codec interoperability...

..."OpenMAX IL will enable NVIDIA to put the full power of our advanced video, audio, and imaging silicon into the hands of software developers via a non-proprietary, open standard," said Michael Rayfield, general manager of the handheld GPU business unit at NVIDIA. "NVIDIA is a major contributor to the development of OpenMAX, and we are committed to provide leading-edge handheld media acceleration solutions through open standards."...

OpenMAX,

http://www.khronos.org/openmax/

Sounds like a pipeline of SPUs and other H/W engines (RSX) can share the same media/sound API...

And OpenSL:ES

http://www.khronos.org/opensles/

OpenSL ES API Founding Members

Beatnik
Creative Labs
QSound Labs
Sonaptic

Looks like a full set of open APIs are being developed and adapted for PS3...

 

[tema]

RSX Audio?

Nope, we are allocating an entire SPU for sound.

It's on that PS3 DevStation agenda because it *is* related to PS3's RSX. It's not discussing a pre-1999 sound system for the PC..

I'd have thought this would have been pretty clear.. but these forums have a habit of dragging threads into 'odd' areas..

Dean

But RSX is a crippled GTX512!

 

[Kryton]

OK, what about multi-GPU? Would it be possible (if not necessarily feasible) to throw audio onto a second video card/core in a certain situation? Apologies in advance for my confused n00bness here, but in light of the 'GPGPU' experimentation going on, could this be something that could possibly be looked into?



Of course. Not that I twigged on to that at first sight of the thread, mind

It's already being done: http://www.gpgpu.org/cgi-bin/blosxom.cgi/Audio and Signal Processing/index.html

I think this was one of the first areas where GPGPU became known (through a company stating they would write audio plugins using shaders).

 

[ERP]

Off topic, but wasn't the SGI graphics subsystem (name?) in Nintendo64 used for certain audio processing?

Simply put, if you were to use a modern programmable GPU (in this case RSX) to do audio stuff, what would be the obvious drawbacks?

The original N64 libraries used the RSP to mix audio.
But a lot of games (most of the ones I worked on) used the CPU instead. The last N64 games I worked on actually moved the mixing back to the SPU, but only because we were CPU bound more often than SPU bound and we had microcode access to rewrite the mixer at that point.

The RSP is much more like an integer VU than a graphics chip. It even has 2 execution pipes a vector one and an integer one. It's not unlike sharing an SPU for graphics and audio work.