FR theme: Performance/Graphics issues

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horn wrote: I'm using standard setup (but also changed the buffer size to 2048 samples) with an asio4all driver or a phase26 asio driver. Toshiba Laptop: Centrino 1,5 Ghz, 752 MB Ram.
Buffer size (=latency) does have an effect on the crackling here, it doesn't crackle much at 2048. But it is not realtime at such a high latency. It should work smoothly at 256. How is it for you at 128-512?

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Other Hosts such as Live 6 and Reaper work great for me at 256 and even ok at 128 but energy XT i need to set up at 1024 for no crackles. Maybe a beta problem ?

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I failed to get eXT2 to glitch, using four Shortcircuit 1 instances and a zeta+ instance, at 512 and 96000hz.

Damnit!

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You can reduce the graphics glitches by about half by setting your desktop to 16 bit.

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Graphics setting has absolutely no effect here on the (sound) glitching.

Druid, could you try with a couple of Zebras?
And...I just tried again and there is a huge difference in glitchiness between 256 and 512 buffer. I can believe that 512 could be almost glitchless on a powerful machine. But at least for me, that's still too much latency for MIDI recording.

I am running at 44.1khz by the way, since 96 is way too taxing on the CPU.

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That's why I said graphics, like moving vsts and sequencers around the screen. No doubt that audio is a real problem.

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Yeah, but we are talking about glitches in sound while doing something graphically on the screen (re first post), let's not confuse things. :-)

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I had to use 96khz because I couldn't get any problems when it was down low no matter what I did. :P

Oh alright, I'll download the Zebra demo. I hate installing things just to delete them again. I'll use 48khz at 256 samples, and insert 8 midi tracks playing to 8 different patches in Zebra and see what happens. If CPU use is too high, I will remove one by one until CPU use is not full and see what happens.

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Okay, thanks. Zebra is really nice though, so be careful not to start to want it :-P

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Alright, I checked it. I did what I said and didn't get problems with midi. I tried selecting and moving MIDI notes both inscreen and in the popup window. See screenshot of performance here (with RAM and CPU usage info).
http://www.innerduality.com/xt/perf1.jpg

However, I was curious about maxing (or getting close) to CPU limit, so I whacked in Novakill's Neokiller X2 and sure enough maxed the CPU (it was close enough anyway; I'm talking about cores here, not the whole CPU). While doing this is when I noticed that moving around VSTs in the main window totally stabs it in the face. Disconnecting the first Zebra and replacing it with the Neokiller, I got a bit of stuff. Oddly, when I move the graphics it uses the second core, so maybe multi core support is there? Or does Windows XP spread threads over cores automatically? I didn't think it did.

Anyway, here:
http://www.innerduality.com/xt/perf2.jpg

Perhaps eXT2 is doing audio on one core and graphics on the other, and they aren't syncing properly? Except that it doesn't sound right to me and this is pure speculation as I don't even know if eXT2 has integrated multi-core support yet (I know it's meant to at some point but I never knew if it has it *now* or it will come later).

And what's with Zebra doing random notes when I send it MIDI? :P I assume that's a demo limitation? I thought I'd stumbled onto some really weird bug until Neokiller failed to do the same thing.

[edit]

I should point out that even though it seems to mostly operate just fine for me, I believe there's a problem here because I *have* had problems in the past with 1.4 and I don't believe they've vanished in 2. But they seem better for me, I think. Then again, 2 doesn't have anti-aliased lines, transparent menus and notes depending on their velocity, etc.
Last edited by druid on Thu Jun 07, 2007 10:41 am, edited 1 time in total.

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spritex wrote:
horn wrote: I'm using standard setup (but also changed the buffer size to 2048 samples) with an asio4all driver or a phase26 asio driver. Toshiba Laptop: Centrino 1,5 Ghz, 752 MB Ram.
Buffer size (=latency) does have an effect on the crackling here, it doesn't crackle much at 2048. But it is not realtime at such a high latency. It should work smoothly at 256. How is it for you at 128-512?
256 is the default. It works fine here

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Hmm, it's quite interesting. I wonder if it is CPU specific. None of you without the problem have a P4, right? But I recall that there were also some Athlon users with the problem.

I have a Core2Duo laptop at work, I gotta install eXT2 there and try it out...

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I recall some AMD users reporting such problems on the beta forum too.

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If I remember tomorrow, I'll try the same thing on my Athlon64 3200+ PC, and at least it has a PCI soundcard instead of a USB soundcard I have problems on and off with anyway, making testing a pain in the ass.

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I tried it on my Athlon PC and it works better than on my laptop, I suspect because if I cram the CPU up on the laptop, USB performance will suffer, whereas not so much with the PCI soundcard in my PC, but it didn't take as long to fill the CPU up of course!

Still, both show increases in usage when dragging graphics, but neither glitch quite like what you've mentioned, spritex. Admittedly, both machines run decent CPUs, both machines have 2gb of RAM and plenty of swap, both don't run much at all in the background, both have had various preferences tweaked etc. I'm kind of happy actually, I thought I got more problem than this, but it must've just been in complex energyXT 1.4 projects.

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