UAD Processing Power ...... Back To The Future !!!!!

http://www.gearslutz.com/board/6615391-post47.html
 
Not my post - but nothing more needs to be said about how UAD are  linking their plugins to ancient dinosour technolgy to keep their plugins "dongled" - and this is assuming a UAD2 card.
 
Its  2012  and they are selling hardware [ as a dongle ]  that is generations [ years ]  behind even current low-mid-range CPU's.
 
Its a farce.  Its a joke.  People get sucked in by it  because  they  choose  to ignore the facts.
 
Pro Tools have gone native.
 
Wave dropeed the iLok.
 
Both the above were deemd utterly inconcievable  2  years ago - " .... it will never happen ..... "
 
Sooner or later, UAD will too becasue they will have no choice ........... 
 
tim
 
 

"Beagle"
UAD off loads processing to it's hardware processor - which relieves processing on the CPU.

That's exactly what my Emu 1616m does. It has an onboard DSP chip to take care of FXs processing (in real-time). And even though all my analog work is recorded dry, I like to add FXs pre-send. And the benefits are tangible. 

And before anyone chimes in on the fact that the Win 7 Beta drivers don't support Emu's built-in FXs as a VST inside a DAW anymore (as it did in XP), I never did use them as a plugin.

And that 'dongle' probably makes them the most successful plugin maker out there, and probably the one that will survive the longest. Waves dropping the iLok was them getting rid of something that effectively gained them very little, while probably costing them a lot in terms of development complexity. The same can't be said for the UAD cards, which gain UA a lot in protection.

And, BTW, it's silly to compare dedicated DSP cards to main CPUs. Your main CPUs are being banged around like crazy constantly. They get by on pure oomph to get around the fact that they are constantly being interrupted to do other things. Their theoretical top performance is purely theoretical. You'll never actually get that performance because they are not dedicated to a single task as a DSP card is. So the performance per whatever magical numbers you want to use for comparison aren't really very meaningful.

timboe

Sooner or later, UAD will too becasue they will have no choice ...........  
 
tim
 
 

Will you volunteer to be the complaint center when it does happen? I suspect that many users will say they can no longer load as many instances given their CPU as they could with the "dongle". That is of course relative to CPU advancements within this arbitrary (sooner or later) time period.


My dual "dongles" allow me to load twice the plugs instances than a single dongle. I'm fairly confident that I will not max out my system CPU because of the choice I made.


Can you do that with an ilok, or USB sick (which waves now uses)?


UAD offers three levels of "dongles". Solo (single chip), Duo (two chips) and Quad (four chips). Most people get by with a duo or quad. Some can use a solo. 


I do not agree with the dongle concept when it comes to UAD.

SvenArne
I bet I could run a lot of Studer, Manley and ELabs plugs on my humble GeForce GT 450 (fanless) card... 

Sven

Actually probably not. The processing power in those types of cards is massively parallel type processing, which isn't very practical for most audio processing, which is mostly serial, i.e. what sample X sounds like depends on the samples that came before sample X. So you can't (generally) use parallel processing to great effect for audio manipulation. It's great for video and image manipulation which is often based on squares of pixels to which common operations can be applied in parallel.

....... OK ....... I'll bite ...... I've got some time on my hands ........ 
 
To clarify
 
- I don't personally own and use UAD gear in my studio. but my writing partner has 2 x Quads, fully loaded in their rig and I spend probably [ realistically ]  about  300 hours or so every 12 months mixing there - not a massive  amount of time but enough to know their gear
 
- UAD stuff sounds fine - not the best - not the worst - its sounds good - no argument there - this however is not the issue.
 
- are they better than other high end native plugs from any of the other pro-plug-in designers ..... no
 
- for ultra-low latency live input monitoring purposes, their plugs are ... how should I put this  .....hopeless ... crap .....unuseable ........period
 
- if you own and like UAD ...... good luck to you
 
Here's the rub though.
 
UAD only use the cards / dongles to guard against copying / piracy - clearly that's their prerogative ...... and totally understanble and respectasble ..............however the cards have nothing to do with the plugins sound quality.
 
So ..... why don't UAD simply tell us, the [ potential ]  consumer, this simple information:-
 
=> if their dongles are so good and efficient, what would be the equivalent number of plugs that a person could run with, and without, their dongle cards ?
 
If  UAD could show / prove that with their dongle card,  you could run many times more plugs than without it, then debate over ... UAD "win"
 
However, what if a modern [ mid-range-cheap ]  quad-core i7 could run all the UAD plugs you need, and all at whatever latency you want withpout the need for installing dongles and still leave you buckets of processing power?
 
Now ask yourself  *WHY*  UAD have  NEVER EVER EVER published this sort of comparative information ..... its because they too know that their dongles have nothing to do with performance.
 
I like openness.  I like transparency.  I like not being treated like an idiot.
 
For  UAD to pretend that their dongles are performance enhancers when in-fact they are nothing other than purely copy-protection devices is just galling to me, and I suspect many others.
 
Respect to all.
 
Tim

Damn... I've got an headache now. All this shouting in posts, colors, large fonts and what not. 
No I'm not convinced at all by these "arguments".

And I'm not even an UAD-user

Mod Bod

EDIT: I've also bought several of the Pro Channel plugins and they require SONAR X1 as a dongle.   

Best Mod Bod reply, EVER!!!!

Everything is consumer unfriendly on the internet, to people who have come to believe that everything they want should be theirs to take whenever they want it, howevery they want it.
 

not that it solves anything, but a clarification is in order - the DSP chips on the current generation of UAD DSP cards are Sharc chips, very fast DSP chips, not GPUs. The original UAD-1 did use an arcane GPU.

funny how that works eh? Yeah, I have one UAD2/Solo and I'm trading my UAD-1 (Mackie branded no less) in on a second one. I will miss Nigel... but I'll get over it.