Huge DAW performance improvement post GFX card tweaks!

[barryfell]

I've done some quick research into this question and it sounds like changing to performance from balanced does is keeps all my CPU cores awake. That in conjunction with the Steinberg power plan must help keep all my CPU cores awake thus the improved performance.

Ah, you got a Ryzen? Mr. early adopter

I already disabled core parking some time ago. But that doesn't really have to do with the graphics card, I think.

I've not got a Ryzen CPU, i've got an i7 4790K, but read this part from the article I linked to:

Windows 7 vs. Windows 10

Windows 7 keeps all physical cores awake and parks the virtual cores in CPUs. Windows 10, however, keeps one physical core and one virtual core awake and puts the rest asleep until they're needed. The updated power plan from AMD helps reduce performance hits by keeping the physical cores awake. Intel, AMD said, takes a similar path with its own power plans.

AMD, in fact, had already been recommending that consumers run the High Performance profile instead, which keeps all of the cores awake.

So, I suspect there may be a similar issue with my CPU.

[barryfell]

Have you never hit your CPU limit during audio production?

Of course, just wondered why you wouldn't mix at full buffer. If you're saying even with the buffer set to the highest you're still running out of resources then it's time to set up a slave or two with VEPro. If you stream samples, a separate drive to hold the libraries is better than the OS drive and an SSD even better.

Of course I use full buffer when playback stops/glitches. While I did consider VEPro at one point, it's hardly a quick, cheap or particularly practical fix. Maybe if I was a heavy user of Nebula or big Kontakt libraries etc, but otherwise, it's hard to justify IMO. I think one can only justify a VEPro slave if they need low latency live and need to use a lot of resources. I'd argue that it's far easier for me at mixdown stage to just freeze tracks, wouldn't you?

I've got multiple drives for samples and libraries so no issue there.

Now that someone mentioned reverbs, I recall that's where Cubase can use GPU resources. In was intro'd in one of the latest versions, IIRC. I'll have to read up to refresh my memory as to specifics.

I hadn't heard that but I suspect Reverberate can since it's a convolution reverb so can utilise CUDA.

[barryfell]

DELETE

[bustedfist]

Not questioning your methods, just trying to make sure I understand what you're saying.

Re; VEPro, I know a number of others using it for huge orchestral templates and working all in the box via VSTi's and no live recording, only way they could do it. Yes, there are costs involved and only you can determine if it's worth it.

Again, no digs or the like at your methods, just discussion.

[barryfell]

Not questioning your methods, just trying to make sure I understand what you're saying.

Re; VEPro, I know a number of others using it for huge orchestral templates and working all in the box via VSTi's and no live recording, only way they could do it. Yes, there are costs involved and only you can determine if it's worth it.

Again, no digs or the like at your methods, just discussion.

No worries bud.

If I was using lots of VSTi's I may well have gone down the VEPro route as it probably makes financial and practical sense then. I pretty much use all hardware synths, partly in fact to avoid the CPU issue as I know the quality synths are very CPU intensive so would be a pain to use many of them live, if not impossible due to latency issues.

[exmatproton]

So, what exactly did you change on your graphics card?
I have an older onboard graphics chip and there are many parameters, but no profiles in the driver software. So, what should I change?

I changed the 'graphics profile', which is like a preset for how the cards settings are configured. Cards like those from AMD and NVIDIA comes with programs that allow you to do extensive tweaking that affects it's performance and functionality. I very much doubt a basic onboard graphics chip would have such a program, or if it does just a very basic one that probably doesn't even have most or any of the functions that were using up resources on my system with my AMD card anyway so this probably doesn't affect you.

That's what I am interested in, the parameter settings that slowed down your system. Whatever they are, changing them would probably also help on other systems, maybe even onboard graphics.
By the way, the program I have is called AMD Vision Engine Control Center.

Exactly my point.

No it wasn't. You were bemoaning the fact you weren't familiar with the parameters I was referring to, which certainly didn't need the likes of screenshots if you actually had the software/hardware as they are on such commonly used parts of the apps. Also, exactly what it was doing was beside the point, as it's still not clear even with the potential hint I later dug up. Functional result over operational detail was the imperative. All you did was bemoan this new unconventional idea for optimising DAW performance since you didn't understand it and instead referred to a couple of well known sources for the usual Windows/CPU optimisations that i'm sure anyone looking at this thread for advice will have seen many a time.

I use the hardware you referred to. And i really dislike your tone. Maybe my first post was a bit to harsh. If so, i apologize. But i like to see results, when a "fix" is being posted. Which weren't there. You weren't "technical" enough for my taste. That's all.

As for the lack of screenshots; It is quite arrogant to assume everybody knows were to find settings and tweakable parameters. To post a good "fix", post screenshots when you can.
I build and know my PC systems for years and years, so i know exactly what you are talking about. So, my post was just there to provide some extra info and to let you know that some extra in depth info would be good.

[barryfell]

So, what exactly did you change on your graphics card?
I have an older onboard graphics chip and there are many parameters, but no profiles in the driver software. So, what should I change?

I changed the 'graphics profile', which is like a preset for how the cards settings are configured. Cards like those from AMD and NVIDIA comes with programs that allow you to do extensive tweaking that affects it's performance and functionality. I very much doubt a basic onboard graphics chip would have such a program, or if it does just a very basic one that probably doesn't even have most or any of the functions that were using up resources on my system with my AMD card anyway so this probably doesn't affect you.

That's what I am interested in, the parameter settings that slowed down your system. Whatever they are, changing them would probably also help on other systems, maybe even onboard graphics.
By the way, the program I have is called AMD Vision Engine Control Center.

Exactly my point.

No it wasn't. You were bemoaning the fact you weren't familiar with the parameters I was referring to, which certainly didn't need the likes of screenshots if you actually had the software/hardware as they are on such commonly used parts of the apps. Also, exactly what it was doing was beside the point, as it's still not clear even with the potential hint I later dug up. Functional result over operational detail was the imperative. All you did was bemoan this new unconventional idea for optimising DAW performance since you didn't understand it and instead referred to a couple of well known sources for the usual Windows/CPU optimisations that i'm sure anyone looking at this thread for advice will have seen many a time.

I use the hardware you referred to. And i really dislike your tone. Maybe my first post was a bit to harsh. If so, i apologize. But i like to see results, when a "fix" is being posted. Which weren't there. You weren't "technical" enough for my taste. That's all.

As for the lack of screenshots; It is quite arrogant to assume everybody knows were to find settings and tweakable parameters. To post a good "fix", post screenshots when you can.
I build and know my PC systems for years and years, so i know exactly what you are talking about. So, my post was just there to provide some extra info and to let you know that some extra in depth info would be good.

If you wanted screenshots and step by step details you could have asked nicely for me to do all that extra work, but I assumed that anyone doing such performance tweaks would be competent enough to not need them, which you seem to be saying you are (even though you didn't know what the 'Audio Priority' parameter in Cubase is), but regardless, i'm not sure why you wanted me to spoon feed it to you.

This wasn't a complex fix with explanations for everything. In fact it was literally just two clicks, so screenshots would have been overkill for something that was explained perfectly clearly and any AMD user should find it in seconds.

I had no reason to look up and cite the usual fixes that you linked to, I just referred to them and that I had done them. This was a more advanced stage post than one that starts at audio system optimisation 101. As I say, doing the usual basics was a given.

If you or anyone else wanted more technical info then I was happy to follow that up with respondents, but those are replies best suited to individuals rather than assuming every reading will be a beginner so needs every detail and reason or all pros who just needs the simple subsequent but atypical step I tried. I tend to the latter in threads like this since it's less work and usually accurate.

The fix is still also very mysterious so even i'm not totally sure how it fixed my issue so I couldn't even go into much detail even if I wanted to. I was just suggesting it might be worth others trying it.

[VariKusBrainZ]

So we're still non the wiser lol

[cron]

Regarding the mention of high performance vs balanced power plans, I find the high performance plan straight up non-negotiable. For whatever reason, my machine simply doesn't know that it needs to be running at full speed when audio processing using the balanced plan. The project can be glitching away and a look at Task Manager reveals that my CPU is just idling, bouncing between about 1.5 and 2.5 (ish) GHz, presumably in response to demand elsewhere in the system. I've seen this on both machines I've owned in recent years. Absolutely every other program I know (although I only use the one DAW) has no trouble knowing when the CPU needs to be running at full pelt under the balanced plan. Even ancient single threaded applications that predate Intel's SpeedStep tech. Perhaps because plug-ins are DLLs at heart? I wonder if this is the basis of the 'optimise for background services' tweak people used to recommend. Still, no problems at all when running the high performance plan here. Ableton Live for what it's worth - not sure if the same thing happens in all DAWs.

As for the graphics driver settings, perhaps the GPU was hogging all the PCI bandwidth for itself (assuming it's a high performance gaming card). I remember that used to be a fairly common issue a while back, but not if that's still (generally) the case these days. Pleased you've managed to wring some extra performance out of your system with the tweak anyway. Nvidia's drivers have an option called 'optimal power' which only redraws the screen when it changes, only kicks the card into full gear when needed, and best of all it works flawlessly 100% of the time - as though there was no power optimisation going on at all. It's a great little feature.

[barryfell]

So we're still non the wiser lol

No, but it's what works that's important, so worth trying even if we aren't sure why it works.

[bustedfist]

Yes, the performance setting always, but you still have to go through the Advanced Power Scheme setup and dis-able sleep of a lot of things. Try it.

Now, something like ASIO Guard in Cubase locks it to a custom scheme with all the settings plain Performance misses. It prevents the system or another program from changing it. It's a little more in depth, I've given the condensed version.

[rifftrax]

Or you could run a headless version of Server 2012 R2 and start your DAW and any required services from a powershell configuration.

Then stack Bitsum's load-balancer on top of that and call it a day. Did you realize that you can buy a full-blown HP Proliant DL380 G6 with 48gb of DDR3 RAM and a dual X55** processor configuration that benchmarks better than most >$500 current processors alone for like ... I dunno, like $250 shipped for the entire thing?
http://www.ebay.com/itm/181984594472

Just add a bunch of $12 a piece HP 10k 146gb SAS drives and call it a day:
https://www.amazon.com/HP-HDD-146GB-SAS ... B003KPGFTM

Then you've additionally got sequential read speeds that will shit all over the best SATA3 SSD configuration (because, you know SATA3 is balls compared to NVME and even SAS). Hell, go a step further and add an PCIe x2 M.2 drive adapter and drop a proper 250gb NVME samsung 960 in there for the boot drive. It sure as hell won't be quiet but for god's sake why the hell wouldn't you just thinclient into the bitch at that point?

Honestly... let's look at total cost of ownership for what we're talking about here. $250 for a full blown dual Xeon server with redundant power supplies, $96 for 1TB of very quick hot-swap RAID5 SAS storage (don't forget an extra drive or two), $120 for a >3.5GB per sec capable NVME boot drive (server 2012/win8/win10 natively supports NVME boot), and maybe $60 or free for a crappy older computer with dual-monitor out you can use as a thin client.

So for possibly less than $500 before OS you have a system that will absolutely destroy most of the custom builds people here are bound to do in real-world results and also adds in all kinds of redundancy. Knowledge is power guys.

[barryfell]

Or you could run a headless version of Server 2012 R2 and start your DAW and any required services from a powershell configuration.

Then stack Bitsum's load-balancer on top of that and call it a day. Did you realize that you can buy a full-blown HP Proliant DL380 G6 with 48gb of DDR3 RAM and a dual X55** processor configuration that benchmarks better than most >$500 current processors alone for like ... I dunno, like $250 shipped for the entire thing?
http://www.ebay.com/itm/181984594472

Just add a bunch of $12 a piece HP 10k 146gb SAS drives and call it a day:
https://www.amazon.com/HP-HDD-146GB-SAS ... B003KPGFTM

Then you've additionally got sequential read speeds that will shit all over the best SATA3 SSD configuration (because, you know SATA3 is balls compared to NVME and even SAS). Hell, go a step further and add an PCIe x2 M.2 drive adapter and drop a proper 250gb NVME samsung 960 in there for the boot drive. It sure as hell won't be quiet but for god's sake why the hell wouldn't you just thinclient into the bitch at that point?

Honestly... let's look at total cost of ownership for what we're talking about here. $250 for a full blown dual Xeon server with redundant power supplies, $96 for 1TB of very quick hot-swap RAID5 SAS storage (don't forget an extra drive or two), $120 for a >3.5GB per sec capable NVME boot drive (server 2012/win8/win10 natively supports NVME boot), and maybe $60 or free for a crappy older computer with dual-monitor out you can use as a thin client.

So for possibly less than $500 before OS you have a system that will absolutely destroy most of the custom builds people here are bound to do in real-world results and also adds in all kinds of redundancy. Knowledge is power guys.

So you'd use that as a slave with VEPro, or am I missing something?

[bustedfist]

So you'd use that as a slave with VEPro, or am I missing something?

His way of saying if you knew what he did, you wouldn't have to.

[barryfell]

So you'd use that as a slave with VEPro, or am I missing something?

His way of saying if you knew what he did, you wouldn't have to.

I thought that was maybe what he meant. It's an ugly big beast so if I was to have it i'd lock it away and use it as a VEPro slave.

Is a 8 year old system really going to 'destroy' most modern custom builds?