Multi processor support differences in various hosts

[LawrenceF]

Hibidy my friend, if Studio One is too inefficient for you to be usable, why bother with it? I don't understand. Use whatever works best for you.

Reaper performs way better on your system. Seems like the choice is clear for you so why worry about it? I'd suggest that to anyone really, if the performance difference is so wide that it makes that much difference, and that's really important, easy choice.

Thanks man.

[hibidy]

Hibidy my friend, if Studio One is too inefficient for you to be usable, why bother with it? I don't understand. Use whatever works best for you.

Reaper performs way better on your system. Seems like the choice is clear for you so why worry about it? I'd suggest that to anyone really, if the performance difference is so wide that it makes that much difference, and that's really important, easy choice.

Thanks man.

I am, believe me. But I'm going to be an activist in these types of threads. I think it's ok for software companies to work WITH customers and not against them. Too much tude (and with some companies not named presonus it's a long a frustrating history)

[hibidy]

Oh, and @ studio one: I expect companies that are cutting edge, to be cutting edge. I don't get a bad vibe from those guys but in fact I really want to like S2.

[LawrenceF]

I hear you. Tony didn't code Studio One (or Reaper) though so I'm not sure what Reaper vs. S1 has to do with his vid. The video was (IMO) informative as to how Windows schedules things in general.

Now why - for your case - Reaper is performing way better than S1 on your particular system, that's really not a question Tony can answer. The video is kind of a wide stroke, some of the larger concepts related to scheduling in general.

I'd say if you really like some parts of S1, whatever you bought it for (mixing?, mastering?, dunno) use it for that and enjoy it.

[tony tony chopper]

with his vid

..which I didn't make either, anyway


About core parking btw, it's a good idea on the paper, but my (brief) experience with it is that it takes some time for cores to "unpark" (no idea what it's really doing internally, though), and I've noticed audio underruns if the CPU usage raises very abruptly, as during a few ms the parked core isn't available yet. That's the only reason I would advise messing with energy saving settings.

[LawrenceF]

with his vid

..which I didn't make either, anyway

Well, yeah. By "his vid" I meant "the vid you posted", Scott's vid.

[hibidy]

edit

n/m

[jancivil]

all that video showed me is that a simple synth sound in FL can max out 8 cores pretty easily.
on somebody's system.

[hibidy]

AGREED!

I still don't understand how an 8 core ANYTHING can be maxed out by one synth patch.

My current reaper project has maybe less tracks than some, but it's tril, SD, a couple of kontakts (with 8/8 each) a couple of "maschines" and two x my guitar temp (which is 8 amplitube and a combined 6 verb tracks) and it's like 20% cpu (maybe 30% when it's at absolute max)

[Amberience]

Informative how? I found it insulting, then again, no surprise considering.

Studio One has a little thing you can get which disables core parking, speed stepping, all that. On my system it did nothing

However, I can run gobs of high cpu instruments is REAPER and there is never any kind of issue whatsoever.

What kind of system specs are you running?

I get very reasonable CPU performance from Studio One. I've got my bands next album, and each project has loads of plugins and effects, and they're only peaking at about 60%

But I'm on a i7 .... so could just be I've got more headroom to play with.

[helium]

Truth is that neither will give roadmaps for products like that until existing ones have been sold. Lets see what happens in the next few years, multi core isnt a wow factor anymore, 128 bit will be.

The only thing 128bit addresses would do is slow things down as now each address takes twice the space.

The google CEO recently estimated the size of the whole internet to be about 5 exabyte. With 64 bit we can address 16 exabyte. So you can put the whole internet three times in your ram and there would still be plenty of space for other things. Before we need more than 64 bit we first need to generate enough data, so we have something we can store there.

[Richard_Synapse]

I don't see any sense in 128 bit, but I'm not a hardware developer.

From a software perspective, moving to 64 bit makes sense, not just to remove the 2/3 gb RAM limit of 32-bit software, but also to speed up 64-bit operations, which are useful and sometimes required in DSP code to get the desired precision. But for 128-bit I don't see any applications in DSP yet. I also have some doubts whether the CPU and RAM will keep growing at past rates. The CPU performance per core has not evolved much (or at all) in the last couple years.

Richard

[Benjaminjo]

This is another "I cant make music because of problem X with computers" thread. Of course you can make music. Focus on what you CAN do rather than worry about what you cant. Otherwise you will always find something to get in the way.

That's always a good point to remember. But it doesnt alleviate my frustration of not being able to use the tools I have the way I could used them. 20 years ago when I was running out of sampler's memory I could go the store and buy more ram or I could have chopped that nice vocal sample to make it shorter. If I wanted that third synth line buy a third synth or simply skip that part. The limitations were clearly there "in your face", up to you how to avoid them or how to use them at your own advantage.
Now I have a super computer, that I have buyed just because I want to run many nebula instances without stopping my workflow every 5 minutes to freeze tracks here and there. This machine could easily handle my workflow but actually it wont. Or better, it will but only in a specific scenario with specific software I don't want to use. It's crazy! The power is there but I cannot reach it with the tools I'm used too, gosh.
Of course I can live with that and continue to make music, but I feel like sitting in a Porsche that must be driven like a Yugo.

cheers

[Benjaminjo]

Richard from Orion said it is the plugin's fault, but how come in Reaper the same plug behaves correctly? How's that possible?

I didn't say it is the plugins fault. I said the next generation of plugins can be expected to be multi-threaded, and that plugins do a much better job at balancing the processor load.

It's easy to see why. Let's say we have two instruments, one needs 25% CPU and the other 75% CPU (of one core). A host that is not multi-threaded will thus use 100% CPU (25+75). A multi-threaded host like Orion will use 75% or more, but never less. Less is impossible, because the load of a single plugin cannot be shared among cores.

Now, if plugins are multi-threaded, the situation is completely different. The plugin needing 75% CPU could run on 3 cores in parallel, and the other one needing 25% could run on the fourth core. The total CPU usage would be 25% in this example, instead of 75% or even 100%. The load would be perfectly balanced.

This example does not take into account thread switching times etc and is of course heavily idealized, but hopefully you get the idea.

Richard

Thanks for your clear explanation. I still don't understand what causes this heavy difference between hosts (same plugin under different hosts scenario). If this were everything we should have every hosts behave in the exact same way, right? But they are clearly not. I dont know if AcousticAudio Nebula is in fact a multi-threaded plug in, I'll ask Giancarlo the developer if he can jump in, but I know it is behaving very differently in every host I've tested. What I know is that S2 and Live "instance per core" way of balancing power is less than ideal. Maybe the guy behind Reaper is only "cheating" with mp support (like Tony said), but hey what a good way of cheating that is! Is he introducing latency? Could be, but I can work with that, at least it works!
I'm too ignorant on the subject to judge the work of developers in any way, if you and others are saying there are few options to overcome this issue I can only accept that. I'm just a musician and this post was only to hear other's users experience on this so little known subject and compare different points of view. I've learned a lot in any case (still have to re-read some posts a few times though ).

thank you
cheers

[LawrenceF]

If this were everything we should have every hosts behave in the exact same way, right? But they are clearly not.
thank you
cheers

I have no real idea how thousands of lines of code from multiple different people working independently would ever behave the exact same way or what would ever make anyone think they would or should.

It's a little silly to me, that expectation. It's like saying that if Ford and Chrysler both build cars that weigh 2500 lbs, have generally the same options and so on, that they should get the exact same miles per gallon. It's a little nuts actually.

The realistic expectation is that you'll be able to make music, get the work done. If a product doesn't allow that (for any reason)... stop using it? Kind of a no-brainer really.

IMO, Reaper is generally the most cpu efficient host there is with the exception of maybe SAW Studio and maybe one other, case dependent. I don't see the wide margins others do but there is a margin, and if that's the criteria for making music, to be the most cpu efficient host, no brainer shopping decision.