graphics card

Sorry, poor phrasing.

It seems to behave as if the GPU is way weaker than it actually is. I would think that an iGPU that can run a fair amount of modern game at reasonable framerates on 1080p should be powerful enough to run VCVRack at reasonable framerates, too.

If you personally, on your machine, is running demanding games on it then yes, it should work well with Rack as well.

I am never sure what happens when your system has two GPUs, one terrible and one good. Is it possible VCV is using the bad one? I know there is some way to figure out which is being uses. Maybe this line in the log file?

[1.953 info src/window/Window.cpp:336 Window] OpenGL: 4.6.0 NVIDIA 457.51

1 Like

So a GeForce GT 710 would be a possible candidate, as per Ahornberg’s suggestion. Any other suggestions? I’ve been looking up the 710’s second hand, there’s a few on offer, but they all seem to have different specs. And different prices.

I use a radeon rx 570 4GB (linux) driving a HD & a 4K, works fine for VCV.

Your current CPU integrated Intel UHD 630 is substantially more powerful than the GT 710. Unless there is a specific compatibility issue with the integrated one, the GT 710 will be a downgrade, all in all.

Other than that, when ever getting a graphics adapter for an audio system, make sure the drivers play nice with the rest of the system, not causing DPC latency problems on Windows, and so on. Preferrably search for a solution that you can verify working nicely in a low-latency context already, in someone else’s (or some audio computer provider’s) build, and go with the exact same one.

1 Like

At least in the Linux world, multi-GPU affair is still an adventure. X11 is very tricky to setup with multi-GPU mapped to a single desktop. If you’re into the muti-GPU multi-display scene, your best bet these days is to use Wayland that can natively do it. From Rack’s perspective, it’s pretty simple. Rack is an OpenGL application. It will render on whatever OpenGL chooses as it’s default display. There’s no compute, offloading or OpenCL involved here, just simple rendering. The absolute majority of Linux systems will only use one GPU (the primary or boot GPU) for their X11 display. Any additional GPUs can be used as a compute or rendering engine using whatever APIs the GPU driver is offering (such as NVidia CUDA or OpenCL) but it’s up to the application to use those. I have a dual GPU setup in my rig. RTX3060Ti is my primary GPU and is mapped to X11 as a single display driver. The other GPU is a RTX3080Ti - a very powerful GPU. I use it mainly as a passthrough GPU into a VM running Windows 11 (mostly for gaming). When I’m not running it in the VM, I can bind it back to the Linux host NVidia driver and use it for very fast NVENC assisted streaming/recording using OBS, rendering high-resolution videos in KdenLive, or experimenting with ffmpeg.

2 Likes

So, it seems, in this case, I might have unwittingly led someone astray about GPU in this context.

I’m definitely no expert in the realtime / DSP software/programming field. Nor in the DSP hardware field. Also, my “hardcore” programming days are in a distant past.

Nowadays I work on designing, implementing, supporting and adapting complex administrative systems/components for large companies and government and such. A whole other ballgame. Everything works at a way slower pace there…

Anyway…

I know of DSP projects that do use GPU for parallel processing. E.g. a little known beast called Tranzistow (for its 8 OP Additive+FM engine) http://www.hrastprogrammer.com/hrastwerk/tranzistow.htm http://www.hrastprogrammer.com/hrastwerk/diodow.htm

Also Everett from Seaweed Audio has been working on integrating AVX and GPU processing into his FathomSynth project. He did integrate AVX/AVX2, but I have not checked recently to see if he succeeded to overcome the obstacles for GPU (e.g. latency).

That not what I meant. OP has two gpu. Presumably vcv is only using one of them. Which one?

I’m just saying it can’t be done with low latency. Yes, I know people do audio on GPU. Have been for decades. VCV not possible. People I worked with investigated it extensively.

It might sound to you that I’m trying to win some kind of argument? I’m not…

I have a lot of respect and owe many thanks to people like yourself that provide us with access to many (often free) tools (and knowledge) we could only dream of some decades (or even some years) ago.

1 Like