Modern graphics processing units typically have more transistors than the CPUs with which they're paired, though they run at much slower clockspeeds. This being the case, GPU makers are now trying to tackle the same problem that CPU makers have been working on for a while, namely, how to find useful work for all of those transistors to do.
It's an extremely rare game that absolutely maxes out a top-end video card, and many games are often bound by non-GPU factors like bus bandwidth and CPU power. In fact, game graphics processing requirements routinely lag GPU horsepower, because developers that aim to actually sell games cannot target only the very high end graphics cards. The end result is that good GPUs have cycles to burn, which is why companies like ATI and NVIDIA are trying to come up with ways get non-graphics code running on their GPU hardware.
We've reported previously on NVDIA's demonstration of GPU-based physics processing capabilities, and now X-bit is reporting that ATI has plans to get developers running audio code on the Radeon X1300 GPU. ATI is releasing a new audio processing software developer's kit (SDK), and they demoed a basic equalizer application for it at a recent London event.
Should Creative be scared?
I see audio as a much better fit for the GPU than physics processing. All you need to do audio is a digital signal processing (DSP) chip, which is essentially what a GPU is. Even more important is the fact that an audio processor is an output-oriented chip, like the GPU.
What I mean by this is that input comes from the user or from some other point in the system, the CPU figures out what to do with it; then if output is necessary, the CPU sends some commands to an output unit (a GPU or soundcard) that say, "make this noise this way" or "draw this image." The output chip doesn't have to send a lot of information back to the CPU in order to do fill its role. The CPU just hands off the job to the output DSP, and the DSP works on it and then sends the audio or video results directly along to the user.
So yeah, I think Creative and other soundcard makers should be worried. The threat from ATI and NVIDIA isn't imminent yet, but it is real. There will have to be some hardware changes before it happens, but at some point, you may be able to harness the full power of a next-generation GPU to do high-end audio processing.
