64-bit audio engines are on the way !

[Brandon Ryan]

Are you contending that virtual effects and instruments do not get any CPU benefit from native x64 compatibility?

You're trying to change my words, but yes, they do. Just like 64bit mixing is 'better' than 32bit. Both are better, but it's neglectable.
I haven't seen, in the past, any host or plugin hyping a 20% CPU increase that much.

Not trying to change your words...just trying to see where you're coming from. I guess I see it like this: A lot depends on the circumstances. If you at least agree that some instruments and effects get some kind of a boost, then wouldn't this be exponential as you add up these effects and instruments in a project? I remember a review (can't recall which mag off the top of my head) where the reviewer stated that he did indeed see about a 20% decrease in CPU use when comparing using one of the demo projects. This was no doubt mostly because of the effects and instruments in the track. The performance boost really depends on what you are running in the project, not simply on a "host" playing back un-effected raw tracks and being a "host" in the strict sense of the word. The more x64 capable plugs you run the bigger the performance boost. If I'm running a plug that only gets a 1% CPU boost and then I run 30 of them is that negligible? It's not to me, and in a world where people turn off services and animated windows etc to save a percent or two of their CPU I think there is a decent faction of users who would appreciate this "negligible" gain. And an x64 host is obvioulsy required to run upcoming and current x64 native plugs to take better advantage of the possible CPU benefits. And to top it off, with dual core and high clockspeeds these days, even a mere handful of percentage points equals a pretty impressive amount of CPU power IMHO (hundreds of mHz).

[sQeetz]

Will 128bitFP audio also be such a revolutionary step up in the future? Maybe in somehting about 3 - 5 years? Just asking.

[sQeetz]

Anytime soon we'll have the 'almost analog' digital audio capturer.

[stag]

69 bit, now you're talking, or biting i don't know... i run out of cialis.

[sQeetz]

wish I had some more jalapeños for my Steak right now. ^^

[tony tony chopper]

If you at least agree that some instruments and effects get some kind of a boost, then wouldn't this be exponential as you add up these effects and instruments in a project

?

Of course not. If a plugin really gets a 20% CPU boost, then it needs to be all of the plugins for the project to get a 20% CPU boost. If only some of the plugins do, the final result is even less.

The performance boost really depends on what you are running in the project

Talking about this, what are the CPU costs of running a 32bit plugin (I don't know how you do it, some kind of thunking? a separate process maybe?) in a 64bit host?

If I'm running a plug that only gets a 1% CPU boost and then I run 30 of them is that negligible?

I don't see what you want to say here. If you can run 30 of them, then your plugin eats at most 3.3% CPU. A 1% CPU gain for this plugin would be.. 0.033%?



Really, in a few years we will ALL be coding for 64bit CPU's. Maybe even mixing in 64bit. Why? Because it doesn't hurt. All I'm saying is that it's
-not magnitudes better, it's just a little feature that could be in a spec sheet, but it's not worth making a video of it
-misleading the user that thinks you need a 64bit CPU to mix in 64bit, or telling him that 64bit mixing is 'new'

It's a nice feature, it can't hurt, but why make it sound like the user NEEDS this?

[saturdaysaint]

The 64-bit version of Sonar and Sonar's 64-bit mix engine (which is also available in the 32-bit version of Sonar!) are two different topics that are being referred to interchangeably in most of this thread! 64-bit is undeniably the wave of the future and it's cool that Cakewalk has jumped on it early. On the other hand, I'm a Sonar user, and to me the 64-bit mix engine isn't that big of a deal - there were much bigger features in Sonar 5, where it was introduced. I don't notice much of a difference and personally I suspect it was ultimately a way of combatting some of the utter pseudo-science of the Samplitude and SAW literature with a "sound-quality" feature that at least has some logic to it. For most real-world home recordists (i.e. 99% of you guys), improvements to room treatment and other equipment would probably have an exponentially bigger impact.

In terms of sound engines, I think Samplitude'9s handling of latency is the coolest thing I've heard of in a long time (although I know Logic's had it for a while) - the ability to lessen the performance blow of super-low latencies could really be a huge boost for all native hosts. I hope the other big boys catch up sooner rather than later.

[tony tony chopper]

64-bit is undeniably the wave of the future

true, and that's the problem: it's made for OSes that aren't even out yet.

Once everyone is running a 64bit OS, then releasing a 32bit app will be as pointless as releasing a 64bit app right now.
Of course, one has to start..

[stag]

[Brandon Ryan]

Really, in a few years we will ALL be coding for 64bit CPU's. Maybe even mixing in 64bit. Why? Because it doesn't hurt. All I'm saying is that it's
-not magnitudes better, it's just a little feature that could be in a spec sheet, but it's not worth making a video of it
-misleading the user that thinks you need a 64bit CPU to mix in 64bit, or telling him that 64bit mixing is 'new'

It's a nice feature, it can't hurt, but why make it sound like the user NEEDS this?

My point is this: If each plugin takes even a small percentage less (of total CPU I mean) then I'm saving CPU, even if it is a relatively small amount. If I have a reverb that uses 20% CPU under x86 and uses 18% under x64, I have saved 2% of my CPU usage. Another and I'm at 4%. To some even a 10% total reduction in CPU useage is a decent savings and can make the difference between a project that won't play at all and one that runs (albeit with high CPU usage). I appreciate that to some this is negligible and that other steps can be taken to conserve CPU. Obviously things like multi-core support and good freeze implementations do even more for CPU resources than x64 support. My point was only that it is indeed possible to see what I would consider to be big enough CPU performance enhancement to be noteworthy.

But as you point out in a manner, all of this would not be nearly as noteworthy if it weren't for the improved RAM access. Not only does this help for large sample-based instruments, but the whole OS itself and UI interface seems more responsive when not starved for RAM and this can only come with x64 capable DAW's. I'm not sure I've seen anyone (including myself) say that you need x64 native software to be able to make a song. But it will sure be nice when we don't have the RAM limitations of x86 systems holding us back.

Lastly, the last intention I think anyone has is trying to make people think they need x64 capable systems to use 64-bit DP mixing. To the contrary, I spend a fair amount of time trying to explain otherwise.

[duncanparsons]

64 bit mixing? Podium's had it for ages..

Not convinced about what all the fuss is about, and I've a programmer for >20 years, and a musician/engineer for >15 years..

32 bit float is an improvement on 16bit integer, but is difficult to distinguish from 24bit integer unless you have very good equipment. 64bit is just art for art's sake.

64 DAW? NTrack, whilst it's often the subject of scorn and derision, was one of the first to offer an x64 download, and certainly the first of the budget sequencers..

And both of those have been my main workhorses for the last couple of years - am I visionary or what

but still, I guess it's exciting!

DSP

[Rajah]

stop this hyping and excitement about internal 64 audio fp maths.

Huh ?

Are you afraid of innovations... 64-bit is the future of computers !

The best is the couple of 64-bit audio engine with 64-bit application. You'll get better performance, better handling of big sessions with lot of effects...

Have you seen the Cakewalk demonstration of the use of 64-bit in audio ?

Nice... So what will happen to Hardware like Receptor?

[Radek]

Will 128bitFP audio also be such a revolutionary step up in the future? Maybe in somehting about 3 - 5 years? Just asking.

Even steps from 8bit cpus to 16bit and then 32bit ones were only so big because with "bitness" there were also improvements like pipeling, superscalars, bigger caches, faster clockrates, more memory bandwith.
There's nothing stoping anyone from doing even 256 bit mixing on a Intel 4004 4-bit cpu. It's only a question if given chip can handle it perfomance wise (read in a reasonable time).

Then we have an architectural differences in x86 compatible processors. Some might really run much faster with 64 bit opcodes, some others (the ones with small caches) might actually run slower in some situations. Anyway most time a VST plugin is spending running SSE type code today. Perfomance of SSE unit can be different issue altogether...
(Core2 has twice as fast SSE as before and it could have it even without so called x86-64)

[WillieJenkins]

This is the strangest thread I've seen in a while.

I'm glad the thread starter clarified that a number of hosts have had 64-bit audio engines for over a year now. Not sure if "on the way" is the right terminology. More like "other hosts are catching up".

Secondly, why is 64-bit float on the mix bus a big deal? Because for EONS now one of Digidesigns main selling point is that they use a 48-bit fixed point mixing bus, and that this was a 'cleaner' sound then the standard 32-bit floating point busses that most DAWs used at the time.

When Sonar 5 was released over a year ago, Ron Kuper gave a talk at AES in NYC where he demonstrated mathematically that when mixing multiple 24-bit wav files at various gain levels, there were quantization errors on 32-bit mix busses.. These quantization errors were gone when using the 64-bit mixing bus. Not only that, a 64-bit floating point mixing bus is more accurate then a 48-bit fixed point mixing bus, so this is an important point for marketing when trying to convince people away from Digi hardware.

Thirdly, there are a BAZILLION posts on this site asking how to save cpu, everything from not using wallpapers, to detailed explanations of which services to turn off, to not enabling internet access on someones DAW. There are equally as many posts talking about how "I bought such and such a dual core intel cpu, and overclocked it to such-and-such a level, with no issues!"... Why are we doing this?? TO SAVE CPU....

Someone comes along and tells you that "If you use this x64 executable on this x64 OS then you'll get up to 20% cpu gain FOR FREE" and people start thumbing their noses at it?

Brandon is right, if you have an instance of altiverb, or pristene space, or whatever, and that normally takes 10% CPU, and now it takes 8%, that 2% is pretty damn significant, if it wasn't, we wouldn't treat our DAWs like fine vintage cars.

Everyone who seemingly doesn't care abuot

a) audio quality
b) cpu usage

why haven't you sold your daws and bought old ataris with cubase on them?

[BONES]

I just want to be able to run more than 2gb ram reliably

Then all you need is a 64 bit OS, our million dollar systems at work have been running 32 bit applications on 64 bit OS's for years, allocating up to 16Gb of RAM for the application.

man, vista just looks like its going to be an even worse graphical mess ram-sucker than xp. Hell, i'd be using 2000 if it wern't for the software compatibility that xp has (some of my hardware simply won't work without xp)

You know you don't need to use any of that krap, don't you? I've stuck with my "Windoze Classic" look as it is far more customisable - the fancy ones are all much too bright and limiting. If that changes for Vista then they had better have much better customisation than they do in XP.

Oversimplification here, but why did we ever move to 32 bit from 16 bit? or to 16 bit from 8 bit? Those that don't see a benefit to moving to 64 bit computing should move back to 8 bit processors and be happy because obviously all those bits are not needed, right?

You're an idiot. Colour is more my specialty so I'll explain it from that point-of-view, although its pretty much the same for audio. 8-bit colour processing gives you a total range of 256 colours, like a GIF image. 16-bit processing gives you a range of 65,536 colours which is much better but if you change your graphics card settings to 16 bit you will definitely notice the difference. 32 bit processing gives us 4.2billion colours which is considerably more colours than any device can display and probably more colours than the human eye is capable of perceiving. The standard colour depth for digital images is 24 bit [8bit x 3 channels] which covers more than enough to be able to display any image with sufficient precision.
Working with 8bits-per-channel precision leaves some room for calculation but when compositing images over one another we sometimes get nasty artifacts like colour-banding and clipping/clamping [just like overdriven audio]. It also limits how much we can alter an image before it starts to look "wrong". 16bits-per-channel gives us a lot more room to manouvre and, in my experience, is plenty for most of the work I do. Processing image information with 32bit precision gives us a mile of headroom for making calculations that will result in full, natural colour no matter how much we alter [process] the image. With HDRI, an image which takes full advantage of 32bits-per-channel, we can make a single image look like anything from middle of the night to middle of the day without any perception of the image having been altered to achieve the result. Going to 64bit colour precision will not in any way improve our ability to do the kind of work we do in the film/TV/video industry. There is just no advantage at all.
In audio, 32bit precision gives us virtually infinite headroom already so going to a full 64bit processing pipeline is not going to give us too many practical advantages. As already mentioned, there are plenty of applications which already take advantage of 64bit processing where it makes a difference and this has to be more efficient than doing everything with twice the bit depth whether it matters of not.

There's only 1 true point in all this marketing stinking bullshit, 64bit app = access to more than 2GB = huge audio in RAM.

Actually Gol, you only need a 64bit OS for that.