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Current mood:  creative Category: Web, HTML, Tech
Hello friends,This is my first in a series of audio and video oriented blogs that I'll be doing in the next following weeks.As most of you probably already know, I've been working in both the audio and video fields for some time and there's some experiences and information that I would like to share with you all.To deal with the high CPU processing demands on both video and audio content creation while on the road I recently acquired an HP mobile workstation laptop powered with an incredibly powerful graphics card, the NVIDIA Quadro FX 3700M.I've been a user of the NVIDIA graphics cards for a while and I've found them to be reliable and indispensable such as in the case of my home studio’s workstation GeForce dual monitor video card.Anyone working with audio software knows the advantages having a dual monitor displays brings while working with the host audio software and various plug-ins and rewire applications. It wasn't until I started working with my new laptop that I became aware of NVIDIA's CUDA hardware. CUDA is not only engineered to maximize the performance of video software such as the Adobe CS4 and Sony Vegas9 but also enhances the performance of audio applications by enabling CUDA VST plug-ins to access the GPU, and the memory in the NVIDIA graphics card, while freeing the CPU to perform other tasks such as running the host program. So instead of having the resources of the video card just sitting there untapped, you can put it to work and alleviate the strain on the CPU. Another of the advantages of CUDA is the fact that nearly 90% of the computers in the market already have an NVIDIA card installed so chances are that you can, without having to upgrade your card, install the latest NVIDIA drivers with CUDA support and take advantage of this incredibly powerful option. And even if you need to upgrade to an NVIDIA Quadro card it’s totally worth it having not only a powerful video card to run your video editing applications but also the advantages of using the CUDA VST plug-in options. You can visit NVIDIA's website, http://www.nvidia.com, to see if your card supports the CUDA driver. Once you verify that your NVIDIA card is compatible with CUDA, the installation process is pretty straight forward. Just download the CUDAGFX drivers ,CUDA Toolkit and CUDA SDK from this site, http://www.nvidia.com/object/cuda_get.html. Make sure you download them according to your Operating System XP32, XP64, Vista32 or Vista64. In order to install the new drivers you must first uninstall the old Graphics drivers. Go to the Start Menu -> Control Panel -> Add/Remove programs. Then select Change/Remove the "NVIDIA Drivers", this should launch a question saying: "Do you want to remove the NVIDIA Display driver?" and click Yes. If Change/Remove the "NVIDIA Drivers" launches a panel with multiple options then only select the "NVIDIA Display Driver" and no more. After uninstalling reboot the system. Once your system restarts, install the new CUDA driver and reboot the system.Now install The CUDA 2.2 Toolkit and SDK in this order. Once the CUDA Driver, Toolkit and SDK are installed it's time to download the CUDA VST Plug-ins. Unfortunately at this time there aren’t a whole lot of them available, but the good news is the ones that are available are either free or there's a lite version of them for you to try. I highly recommend installing this one first, the Impulse Reverb from Nilsschneider.I found this CUDA VST plug-in to be relatively easy to install, it works great with a host program that accepts VST plug-ins such as ACID and it's FREE!!All you need to do is to either use a wav. or AIFF impulse from your library or to find some free impulses online for you to try. You can download this plugin from, http://www.nilsschneider.de/cms/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=29&Itemid=26 After downloading, install by double clicking on the setup.exe. It should place the plug-in into the default location of 'C:..Program Files..Vstplugins', and in case it doesn't, just look for it on your C: drive and drag it into the VST plug-in folder. Your host program should then recognize it once you start your program. Though it sounds great, this is a very basic convoluted reverb plug-in, so you don't have too many options once you open up its GUI. Basically, it's going to ask you to direct the browser to where your impulse library is, choose an impulse and there you go. You have a few sliders to control the amount of wet and dry and such. If you look at the bottom of the GUI you'll find a little window giving you the amount of GPU usage. On my laptop, one instance of this plug-in required 1% of my total GPU memory with ZERO CPU usage. Now we are talking about a convoluted reverb here which usually brings the average CPU to its Knees. And the sound is just as smooth as or even more so than any other CPU driven VST plug-in I've tried before. So just to satisfy my curiosity, I duplicated the same track 20 times thus creating 20 separate instances of the plug-in with different parameter settings and what a pleasant surprise to see and hear the playback just as clear and smooth with the GPU usage window showing that only 20% of my GPU memory was being used and still ZERO CPU usage. Now, you all know that as a norm we just use one or two instances of reverbs during a mix in a couple of FX buses where all the tracks that need reverb will be routed to. So I was just having a little fun trying to see how far I could push the NVIDIA Quadro graphics card. Incredibly impressive!!! The other CUDA VST plug-in that I recommend is the Nebula 3 from Acustica Audio. This plug-in is available from the Acustica audio website, http://www.acusticaudio.net/ The Nebula3 is a multiprocessor with an ample amount of effects although currently it’s only the reverb that uses CUDA. There's both a free and commercial version that you can download. I suggest that you download the free version first and check it out. I highly recommend it. Just make sure that when you download either the free or commercial versions of the Nebula3 that you also download the CudaBridge install. And if you download the commercial version then you also need to download the commercial libraries to actually get the effects to use with Nebula 3. There's 7 pages worth of libraries available on the website such as Volterra-1 & 2 & 3,Lagoon-1 & 2, Hispasonic, OtherTapes and Crab 1 to 16. The Crab libraries actually contain the reverbs which work with CUDA and the GPU. The Nebula free version comes with a minimal selection of effects but it will give you a good idea of how great it sounds. Just follow the installation instructions on the Acustica Audio website. At the moment, NVIDIA is working with other audio software manufacturers to increase the availability of the CUDA VST plug-in. I look forward to hearing all your experiences and feedback regarding these CUDA VST plug-ins. If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to post them on this blog and I will address them on the next blogs, where by the way, I will be discussing the incredible performance boost I’ve been experiencing using Autodesk Softimage, Adobe After Effects and Sony Vegas with the NVIDIA Quadro Graphics card.
1:24 AM
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