I know nothing about this vsti at all, but am intrigued by the news release
noting that they cut CPU usage by 40-50%.
Yipes! Was Ethereal a notorious CPU piggy?
Is that typical improvement for an upgrade or marketeers on the loose? Was this interpreted code that's now assembled? Did they stumble on some magic code optimizer?
We can forget about Freeze functions, I'm thinking they should market their ability to reduce CPU usage by 40-50%.

Hi there

Thanks for the interest, before it was using 50-60% on a 6 note chord using the preset BigCh and now it uses 30-40% using the same setup, on a 1 GHZ machine.

I managed to do this because I found that it was using a lot of processing power accessing large arrays, with smaller arrays and a bit of better memory management I managed to reduce the load quite a lot, some of the preset being better than others

Cheers

Jon: ConcreteFX

Concretefx wrote:

Hi there Thanks for the interest, before it was using 50-60% on a 6 note chord using the preset BigCh and now it uses 30-40% using the same setup. I managed to do this because I found that it was using a lot of processing power accessing large arrays, with smaller arrays and a bit of better memory management I managed to reduce the load quite a lot, some of the preset being better than others Cheers Jon: ConcreteFX

just curious, what platform were these percentages tested on? I mean the demo's a big almost 6 meg download for us 56k ers so just want to know before i dl

Hi there

The figures come from a 1Ghz machine with 256mb.

Cheers

Jon

wrench45us wrote:

I know nothing about this vsti at all, but am intrigued by the news release noting that they cut CPU usage by 40-50%. Yipes! Was Ethereal a notorious CPU piggy?

A few of Ethereal's patches consume a lot of CPU, relative to the speed of the processor. Jon cited the BigC patch in e-mail to me - with that patch I get 43% of CPU used on a 5-note chord on my 1.1Ghz Celeron laptop.

I was a tester for the new algorithm. In the worst case example I could devise, the sound difference between the two was extremely subtle. With the optimized setting, the 43% above dropped to 28% on the same 5-note chord.

This can make the difference between "buy" or "don't buy", or "can I get another note or put another stage in this envelope" or "do I bounce this track".

I'll leave Jon to comment further on this, as y'all already know Ethereal is one of my favorite synths. It's far more than "just" an additive pad synth.

Doug

thanks for the response
nothing like hearing from the source
and as a developer I enjoy hearing the technical internal details
I'm not directly involved in real-time programming, but speed of Windows side execution is as much an issue in my field as CPU usage is in the vst arena. thanks. Esp. sine it's in my price range I'll give it a try.