5 ms·

Computers are really powerful these days, though, it's why physical modeling VSTi are actually usable now. Especially if you do the signal processing on the GPU

• munificent 3y ago
  > Computers are really powerful these days, though, it's why physical modeling VSTi are actually usable now. True, but simulating analog oscillators and filters well with little aliasing and good support for resonance is still quite hard. Current virtual analog synths sound good, but the first time I sat down with a real (but cheap and shitty!) analog synth, I was blown away. > Especially if you do the signal processing on the GPU instead of the CPU (which is thankfully starting to happen as well). There's some stuff you can do here, but my understanding is that it's pretty limited. GPUs are designed for wide parallel computation, which makes sense in graphics where pixels are relatively independent of each other. A GPU is trying to calculate many things at a single point in time in parallel. Audio is about calculating a small number of things (just a few samples) but at a very high frame (sample) rate, and the things you're calculating often depend heavily on the results of previous points in time. There's a lot more fundamentally serial work to do, which makes it hard to map to GPUs.