> You generate N channels worth of 1470 samples per frame, and mix (add) them together. Make N large enough, and make the computation processes associated with

> You generate N channels worth of 1470 samples per frame, and mix (add) them together. Make N large enough, and make the computation processes associated with generating those samples complex enough, and the difference between audio and video is not so different. Sure, but graphics pipelines don't only touch each pixel once either. :) > Jacob Collier routinely uses 300-600 tracks in his mostly-vocal overdubs, and so for sections where there's something going on in all tracks (rare), it's more in the range of 400k-900k samples to be dealt with. Sure, track counts in modern DAW productions are huge. But like you note in practice most tracks are empty most of the time and it's pretty easy to architect a mixer than can optimize for that. There's no reason to iterate over a list of 600 tracks and add 0.0 to the accumulated sample several hundred times. > If you were actually synthesizing those samples rather than just reading them from disk, the workload could exceed the video workload. Yes, but my point is that you aren't. Consumers do almost no real-time synthesis, just a little mixing. And producers are quite comfortable freezing tracks when the CPU load gets too high. I guess the interesting point to focus on is that with music production, most of it is not real-time and interactive. At any point time, the producer's usually only tweaking, recording, or playing a single track or two and it's fairly natural to freeze the other things to lighten the CPU load. This is somewhat analogous to how game engines bake lighting into static background geometry. They partition the world into things that can change and things that can't and use pipelines approach for each task. > And then there's the result of missing the audio buffer deadline (CLICK! on every speaker ever made) Agreed, the failure mode is catastrophic with audio. With video, renderers will simply use as much CPU and GPU as they can and players will max everything out. With audio, you set aside a certain amount of spare CPU as headroom so you never get too close to the wall.