Ableton Forum

hi, i have just order a new laptop, it will have the new,

GeForce® Go 7950GTX graphics modules from NVIDIA®.

My questions are: Does having a good graphics card effect the sound
quality being produced?

What are the advantages of having a good graphics card
when using Ableton, to produce and perform?

What kind of effect? Don't think it has any.

There might be practical advantages, like being able to run multiple screens, but the graphical demands of a DAW are very small.

The graphics card has no direct effect on the sound.

Having a pimped out GPU (which it sounds like you have) will have virtually nil effect on Live performance.

which is quite a shame, given that's possibile to use Gpu power to process audio tasks as vst and similar. Imagine if Live 7 would take advantage of the gpu to power devices and racks...or even the main audio engine.

You may notice that zoomingin and out in arrange screen is a little smoother. Same thing with zooming in and out on waveforms. It will have no affect on sound quality.

My questions are: Does having a good graphics card effect the sound
quality being produced?

Does having new glasses affect the sound quality of my voice?

Well, it might have an effect if you use this plugin. Otherwise, doesn't matter.

i have heard people talk about high-level graphics cards eating into the pci bandwidth -- so depending on how you run your system...

it'll let you run some freakin awesome vj software behind live!! try arkaos, mxwendler or salvation that'll run pretty much everything as pixelshaders on your videocard. mmmmmm.... all audio and video on the one machine...

When I got my 19" display. I bought a Radeon 7000 to drive it at 1280x1024. If I try to select smooth scrolling in Live (5.2) it can barely function. I've tried lots of changes to my system to fix this but basically the only thing I can do is use jump scrolling in Live.

I know that card is ancient history now but just be aware.

r.

which laptop are you getting?!? sounds likee it'll be a fairly kickarse machine

i'll be getting the new Rockdirect xtreme ctx pro,

http://rockdirect.com/viewNotebook.php? ... 0CTX%20PRO

abletoff wrote:which is quite a shame, given that's possibile to use Gpu power to process audio tasks as vst and similar. Imagine if Live 7 would take advantage of the gpu to power devices and racks...or even the main audio engine.

That would involve taking x86 code and translating it to run on a GPU (a completely different type of chip) which would be difficult to say the least. Also, there's the issue of moving stuff from the CPU to the GPU and then back again which current graphics cards aren't really designed to do, so I'm not sure it's really possible.

That being said, a GPU is apparently better suited to the sort of maths involved in audio DSP than a CPU (don't ask me why, that's just what I hear) and things like ProTools DSP cards and those PowerCores and UAD thingies actually use chips that are quite like standard GPUs so the theory makes sense - but what I doubt you're going to see is NVIDIA and ATI and Intel being involved in some sort of standard for this so grassroot developers can make plugins that run on the GPU. They aren't those kind of companies, sadly.

But besides the issue of GPU->CPU bandwidth, it's a good idea... and you're not the first to think of it either.

i'm not sure audio on gpu is something we really want to wish for... i think i'd rather leave the gpu for vj processing, or at least dedicated to keeping my interface as smooth as possible. then again, i guess we all need more power at times...