Modern graphics processing units pack in astonishing processing power that exceeds that of contemporary central processing units. However, apart from 3D games nothing utilizes such power nowadays. Bionic FX, a startup, said Friday its new software allows to compute audio streams and effects using conventional graphics chips practically substituting high-end sound systems.

“BionicFX announces a revolutionary technology for music production that turns NVIDIA graphics cards into audio effects processors. Audio Video Exchange (AVEX) converts digital audio into graphics data, and then performs effect calculations using the 3D architecture of the GPU. The latest graphics cards from NVIDIA are capable of more than 40GFlops of processing power compared to less than 6GFlops on Intel and AMD CPUs,” the company said in the statement.

Some groups have proposed to perform general processing on GPUs, but few presented any final products to support the ided.

The BionicFX AVEX software acts as follow:

• Individual audio samples are isolated from the audio stream;
• Samples are transformed into video data elements and structures;
• Appropriate pixel shader application loaded on the GPU;
• Secondary audio samples are converted to video textures and loaded on video card;
• AVEX data sent to the GPU for processing;
• Iterative processes perform functions and read and write results to textures;
• Final output of shaded pixels sent to off-screen video buffers;
• Video data is retrieved and decoded into audio.

AVEX represents “a major technological achievement” that allows music hobbyists and professional artists to run studio quality audio effects at high sample rates on their desktop computer, the company said.

“The future of audio includes convolution reverb at higher sample rates than ever dreamed on a desktop computer. We are currently working on a time-domain convolution that will perform this processing without converting to the frequency domain. This is absolutely impossible in real time using the CPU of the PC, because the calculations required for even short samples are so high, but it is within the realm of possibility on your GPU. Since the convolution does not convert the audio signal to the frequency domain, the resulting effect does not suffer from quantization errors, and other artifacts. This is only the beginning,” BionicFX said.

BionicReverb, the first effect to use AVEX, will debut at Winter NAMM Conference in January 2005. BionicReverb is an impulse response reverberation effect that runs as a plugin inside VST compatible multi-track recording software. The audio effect is generated by combining an impulse response file with digital audio. Impulse response files are created by firing a starter pistol inside a location, such as Carnegie Hall, and recording the echoing sound waves. Combining the two files through math1ematical convolution is a CPU intensive process that is reduced by moving expensive calculations onto the GPU.

Pricing information has not been revealed by press time.