Best new iMac Pro for rampant Diva use

Official support for: u-he.com
Post Reply New Topic
RELATED
PRODUCTS

Post

About to purchase a new iMac Pro. Going from a 2015 MacBook Pro 15” (quad core i7) which has been extremely frustrating for me in both Ableton and Bitwig Studio. I have to leave Diva on draft or I get tons of crackling and underruns when I have more than an instance or two of Diva open (multicore turned on).

Was really hoping for someone to weigh in on the best choice: 10 core Xeon W clocked at 3.0 GHz each, 4.5 turbo. Or 18 core clocked at 2.3 GHz each, 4.3 GHz turbo.

I know that on a single track with serially chained instruments or effects, everything needs to be on a single core. Was wondering if I would see more typical benefit with Diva running with a higher clock speed, or lower clock speeds but more cores (with decent turbo boost available).

Anyone with any experience here? Diva is what I use most... but I’m also a heavy use of other plugins (serum, effects, fabfilter and soundtoys stuff, kontakt, etc)

Post

Sorry, dont' have first hand knowledge.
I would expect the 18 core to perform better with Diva (not all software, but Diva with its multicore option, and hopefully Ableton and Bitwig like Cubendo engages the turbo mode almost by default)

But I mainly am responding re: your macbook pro..
not sure what cpu speed you have, but I have a mbp 2014 which I use more often these days than my much higher spec'ed PC and it runs well even at the 64 bufffer size I use with a NI Komplete Audio 6 running Sierra.
What buffer size do you use and more importantly what sound card?
rsp
sound sculptist

Post

Don't expect the 18 core to outperform the 10 core for your use case. For most workloads, the 10 core is the sweet spot. If you are running multiple instances of Diva, then with multi-core turned off, the 10-core will definitely be more efficient. In fact, the multi-core option can often make things worse by the time you take into account your other tracks, or multiple instances. The extra clock speed in this case is significant. 30% more.

If it helps, on my 2018 15" Macbook Pro i9 (6-core), on Divine quality, with Multicore turned off, I can't make it crackle or glitch unless I use the Triple VCO and VCF Ladder, set it to 12 or 16 Voices and add a long release tail to maximize polyphony, and play notes rapidly. At 8 voices, it doesn't glitch at all. In other words, I have to work to make it fail. That's with a base clock of 2.9Ghz. If I enable Multicore, I cannot make it glitch no matter what I do. That's on a single instance, granted, but it should give you an idea of what's possible at that clock rate.

So unless your patches are extreme, you should be able to run 10 or more instances on Great accuracy, without problems on the 10 core, and use Divine for offline rendering.

Post

Right, thanks for that summary. The part I don't understand is why enabling multi-core in Diva is sometimes a disadvantage. I believe the u-he documentation itself says people should just try it and see if it's a help or a hindrance.

Higher clock speed will definitely help on a single diva instance... and I guess multicore support only allows parallel processing of different voices?

It's still not totally obvious to me that 10-core at higher clock is better than 18-core at lower, unless the multicore that Diva can itself enable is severely limited.

Those are some good facts around the 6-core 2018 macbook pro. It's nice to hear that it's a capable machine. I definitely hope to use Diva on "great" (with "best" offline accuracy) but I really don't want to have to use Draft anymore unless I have like six or seven running at the same time.

To answer the other questions, I'm usually set to 512 samples, 44.1, with a Steinberg ur22mkii on High Sierra. I know, right?

Post

at 512 and you are still getting such issues? yikes.....
which cpu did you get? mine is the 2.8Ghz, maybe thats why? but I imagine at least you would have a 2.5Ghz?


I am still to test it and Urs and others could correct me, but I get the sense that Diva works great in multicore once you dont' use more instances than cores you have. Actually easy enough for me to test on this macbook pro.

edit: yep thats how it behaves on my macbook pro. 4 real cores, 8 virtual cores.. played 7 instances fine, started to glitch by the 8th, by the ninth instance pop, cracks and stuttering.
I use great accuracy.
rsp
Last edited by zvenx on Tue Aug 14, 2018 8:48 pm, edited 1 time in total.
sound sculptist

Post

2.5 GHz, 16 GB RAM

Post

pstare wrote:2.5 GHz, 16 GB RAM
yeah real odd....
if don't mind... if you can create a simple project using diva... doesn't even have to make much musical sense, just use the factory bank and I can try it here if you would like.
rsp
sound sculptist

Post

Thanks for testing. I’ll try this out tonight.

Post

pstare wrote:Thanks for testing. I’ll try this out tonight.

Np. just realise we dont have the same DAW's .. duh...
so that wouldn't help.
rsp
sound sculptist

Post

i have bitwig and ableton and I suppose I could use a trial of Logic?

Post

:) and I have Cubase, Studio One Pro v3.5
rsp
sound sculptist

Post Reply

Return to “u-he”