Does FL Studio support multi core ?

[Arkadey]

Using the 8.5 beta here and a few times I looked at the cpu meter I was surprised to see it at 35% and not up around 50/55 like it had been in FL8

nawwww, that's the cpu usage... we were talking about multi-core parallel processing

[popmoney]

Using the 8.5 beta here and a few times I looked at the cpu meter I was surprised to see it at 35% and not up around 50/55 like it had been in FL8

nawwww, that's the cpu usage... we were talking about multi-core parallel processing

You've lost me.I'm in the dark re the nuts and bolts of the technology
So if I'm using FL how would improvements in multicore processing show themselves.

[Arkadey]

So if I'm using FL how would improvements in multicore processing show themselves.

you have to ctrl-alt-del it if you wanna know. "perfomance" tab

[Xenakios]

Using the 8.5 beta here and a few times I looked at the cpu meter I was surprised to see it at 35% and not up around 50/55 like it had been in FL8

nawwww, that's the cpu usage... we were talking about multi-core parallel processing

You've lost me.I'm in the dark re the nuts and bolts of the technology
So if I'm using FL how would improvements in multicore processing show themselves.

Say, if you have quad core machine and you can clearly make FL use more than 25% (say at least 50%) CPU as shown in Task Manager and there are no audio playback problems, then it likely has incorporated proper multithreading support. (The reasoning behind this is that an app doing it's main work in only thread could use at most 25% CPU in a quad core machine, 50% in a dual core, 12.5% in an octo core etc...It's all of course more complex, maybe there is a GUI thread too that can use lots of CPU resources etc...)

[Sotiris]

Say, if you have quad core machine and you can clearly make FL use more than 25% (say at least 50%) CPU as shown in Task Manager and there are no audio playback problems, then it likely has incorporated proper multithreading support. (The reasoning behind this is that an app doing it's main work in only thread could use at most 25% CPU in a quad core machine, 50% in a dual core, 12.5% in an octo core etc...It's all of course more complex, maybe there is a GUI thread too that can use lots of CPU resources etc...)

There's a simpler approach to cpu usage:
Don't worry about it,
as long as it is not a problem.
I use FL8 on a 2.66 GHz dual core Pentium PC
and i don't care about cpu usage
simply because it never stopped me
from doing what i wanted.
Who cares if all cores are used
when you got a great groove going
and you get no clicks or dropouts?
Worry about the music, not the cpu strain ...

[Xenakios]

Who cares if all cores are used
when you got a great groove going
and you get no clicks or dropouts?
Worry about the music, not the cpu strain ...

If an app you are using a lot isn't multithreaded properly and you have also invested into a multicore setup, you have essentially wasted money as all the CPU resources are not utilized. Performance in CPUs is these days coming mostly from the multiple cores, not raw clock speed, and that situation doesn't seem to be changing in the immediate future much.

Responsibility of high performance in applications has been shifted from the CPU manufacturers to the application program developers. If that is a good thing or not, is of course debatable. I am personally a bit pessimistic about the situation. Multithreaded programming is not easy. (But it's unforgivable to not at least try... ) But there's tons of old code designed around single threaded execution that might never get rewritten for multithreaded use, thus the performance benefits of today's and future's multicore systems will never be realized. IMHO CPU manufacturers should maybe go back to the gigaherz per core competition...

[audiobot202]

Who cares if all cores are used
when you got a great groove going
and you get no clicks or dropouts?
Worry about the music, not the cpu strain ...

If an app you are using a lot isn't multithreaded properly and you have also invested into a multicore setup, you have essentially wasted money as all the CPU resources are not utilized. Performance in CPUs is these days coming mostly from the multiple cores, not raw clock speed, and that situation doesn't seem to be changing in the immediate future much.

Responsibility of high performance in applications has been shifted from the CPU manufacturers to the application program developers. If that is a good thing or not, is of course debatable. I am personally a bit pessimistic about the situation. Multithreaded programming is not easy. (But it's unforgivable to not at least try... ) But there's tons of old code designed around single threaded execution that might never get rewritten for multithreaded use, thus the performance benefits of today's and future's multicore systems will never be realized. IMHO CPU manufacturers should maybe go back to the gigaherz per core competition...

They're not going to do that because of a cohort of lazy developers now are they?
Besides which, there is a ceiling on the speed of one core. Unless you're willing to ship out super fast cores with liquid cooling to consumers or wait until they reach a super small nano meter manufactuiring process, then multi core makes more sense, is more powerful and makes multiple operating systems running simultaneously possible at some point in the future, The benefits of multi core far outweigh the disadvatntages and in a decade or less, it will be so commonplace, along with 64 bit, that everyone will think single core computers vintage.

Times change and so do CPUs. Multi core is the way of the future, just like 64 bit.

[Aukikco]

So... I'm using FLStudio 9 with a i7-860 quad core processor. When rendering an audio file, the Performance tab under Task Manager shows CPU usage to be ~50%. Of the 8 threads separately shown in the CPU Usage History area, 7 seem to be used for around 50%. Why not full power?

[standalone]

So... I'm using FLStudio 9 with a i7-860 quad core processor. When rendering an audio file, the Performance tab under Task Manager shows CPU usage to be ~50%. Of the 8 threads separately shown in the CPU Usage History area, 7 seem to be used for around 50%. Why not full power?

Because it isn't needed?.

[Spin Boyz]

check out the sos review of fls9.

[ObsoleteAcc99]

[DELETED]

[Aukikco]

Because it isn't needed?.

How come? I'd appreciate faster rendering. Could you open this up a lil' bit?

[james0tucson]

If an app you are using a lot isn't multithreaded properly and you have also invested into a multicore setup, you have essentially wasted money as all the CPU resources are not utilized.

It can be worse than that -- multiple cores can be a liability. We have an industrial application that performs terribly on a multi-processor multi-core system. In order to get acceptable performance from it we must run it on a single processor box and disable 3 out of 4 cores.

[Image-Line]

We get a lot of questions about this. Here's something I wrote for the manual...

NOTE: If you open the Windows Task Manager and examine the number of cores used and their relative loading, this is under the control of Windows. This may come as a surprise since marketing departments make a lot of noise about their multi-threading 'optimizations'. Really, all programs do is publish at least as many threads (independent processes), as there are cores available. FL Studio does that, but, it's the Windows Scheduler that is largely responsible for the core assignment. To complicate matters even single-threaded application may use several cores if Windows decides to flip core assignments at some point, and it often does. So what matters? - If you are testing and comparing CPU loads it is the number of plugins and or effects that can be processed without buffer underruns and the FL Studio internal CPU meter. This is the real-world measure you should use. Don't obsess about how cores are used, particularly at low CPU levels, since the Scheduler will even out this distribution as CPU load approaches 100%. Registered users can see some graphs testing FL Studio core usage here - http://forum.image-line.com/viewtopic.p ... 764#370764

...so in this graph (on a i7-860 quad core with HT) I added plugins to FL Studio at a constant rate and recorded the CPU load until underruns occurred.



Regards Scott