KVR Audio

Andrew Souter · Post by **Andrew Souter** » Fri May 13, 2016 9:07 am

Sampleconstruct wrote:
Galbanum wrote:
Sampleconstruct wrote: Sure, no worries, I can easily wait for another week, I've been power-using KS heavily/every day for 15 months as it is now, so these performance issues were not affecting me so much. But I'm looking forward to the new features to hear, what kind of new sounds they will make possible.
Well, imagine you can now basically probably do completely "live" ambient KS pieces with many more instances than previously... if you could get 15 or 16 of that test preset perviously, 30-40 real-world instances should likely be possible on your (and my) machine now... plus some B2s. Ambient heaven.
Yummie, sounds promising

Actually I recently completed another development cycle as well:

https://scontent.fotp1-1.fna.fbcdn.net/ ... e=57DF17B6

And last night I quickly rendered 15 min of ambient KS (derived from one of your presets I think actually), fed it into B2, exported, sent to iTunes, turned on home sharing, and played it from my iPad for the little guy while he was sleeping...

He seemed to like it a lot!

Sampleconstruct · Post by **Sampleconstruct** » Fri May 13, 2016 9:23 am

Galbanum wrote:
Sampleconstruct wrote:
Galbanum wrote:
Sampleconstruct wrote: Sure, no worries, I can easily wait for another week, I've been power-using KS heavily/every day for 15 months as it is now, so these performance issues were not affecting me so much. But I'm looking forward to the new features to hear, what kind of new sounds they will make possible.
Well, imagine you can now basically probably do completely "live" ambient KS pieces with many more instances than previously... if you could get 15 or 16 of that test preset perviously, 30-40 real-world instances should likely be possible on your (and my) machine now... plus some B2s. Ambient heaven.
Yummie, sounds promising
Actually I recently completed another development cycle as well:

https://scontent.fotp1-1.fna.fbcdn.net/ ... e=57DF17B6

And last night I quickly rendered 15 min of ambient KS (derived from one of your presets I think actually), fed it into B2, exported, sent to iTunes, turned on home sharing, and played it from my iPad for the little guy while he was sleeping... He seemed to like it a lot!

How sweet can it get, what a lovely surprise, welcome little Andrew, he looks very, very sweet indeed! Maybe I have to isolate him from that pic, photoshop him a bit and then make a KS patch...

RichN · Post by **RichN** » Fri May 13, 2016 9:39 am

Galbanum wrote:
RichN wrote:My mid 2010 iMac is still doing fine, but it looks like I'm out of luck now...
Why? We will provide a version that works with SSE also. You will still see lots of benefits. Not all of the speedup is from AVX etc. A larger part of it is from other things we did.

But simply SSE is not as fast as AVX and AVX is not as fast as AVX 2, and AVX 2 is not as fast as AVX 512, etc. As things go in technology.... the latest and greatest is always the absolute fastest... if it were not, no one would buy it... but even I do not have an AVX 2.0 CPU at the moment, and as mentioned I still see massive speedups...

Ah, ok, no problem then.

SJ_Digriz · Post by **SJ_Digriz** » Fri May 13, 2016 10:59 am

Galbanum wrote:
SJ_Digriz wrote:The 1.1 update crashes Cubase 8.5. I can't even use the blacklist workaround.

OS? CPU?

Latest 8.5.x?

Oops sorry, Windows 10 latest build. Yes, latest patch of 8.5. I think it's 20 but will have to check.
CPU is a 980x.

Would you prefer us to use trouble tickets? I didn't intend to make it look messy on the forum. I was fully prepared for this kind of thing.

SJ_Digriz · Post by **SJ_Digriz** » Fri May 13, 2016 11:01 am

Galbanum wrote: And last night I quickly rendered 15 min of ambient KS (derived from one of your presets I think actually), fed it into B2, exported, sent to iTunes, turned on home sharing, and played it from my iPad for the little guy while he was sleeping... He seemed to like it a lot!

CONGRATS!!!!! Being a dad is awesome.

Daags · Post by **Daags** » Fri May 13, 2016 12:19 pm

so to confirm.... this update is not compatible at all (i.e it will not run) with cpus that do not include avx ?

Andrew Souter · Post by **Andrew Souter** » Fri May 13, 2016 12:34 pm

Daags wrote:so to confirm.... this update is not compatible at all (i.e it will not run) with cpus that do not include avx ?

The current beta build (b473) requires AVX 1.0 or higher (and will make use of AVX 2.0, and is completely ready to use AVX 512 as soon as these CPUs are availble -- which is probably not until next year).

The final release version of 1.1.0 will NOT require AVX. We will have some version that uses SSE also, and/or simply non-vectorized code. Denis is just trying to figure out how to do that without having to mess around with multiple dll files at the moment.

The absolute best performance will occur when using the latest version of AVX, but the performance numbers I give above are actually using AVX 1.0, and systems that have AVX 2.0 can be expected to be even better in terms of relative speedup between KS 1.0 and KS 1.1...

Also just FYI KS (and our verbs) are also sensitive to RAM speed. So if/when building/buying a new system, the fastest memory sub-system helps also if you seek to get the absolute maximum performance. Skylake 6700k (and Broadwell Xeon, and Broadwell E and everything newer) for example uses DDR-2400.... (The latest Mac Pro uses 1866 for comparison).

Daags · Post by **Daags** » Fri May 13, 2016 12:51 pm

Cheers, I can live without the AVX-specific performance enhancements until such time as I have such a CPU, but I'd hate to miss out on the other features in the meantime especially in the next update (the feature-centric one as opposed to this performance boost one)... I'm already accustomed to freezing/rendering frequently so I'll survive ; )

Ok then, sitting pretty until the SSE/non-vectorized release.

Galbanum wrote:Also just FYI KS (and our verbs) are also sensitive to RAM speed. So if/when building/buying a new system, the fastest memory sub-system helps also if you seek to get the absolute maximum performance. Skylake 6700k (and Broadwell Xeon, and Broadwell E and everything newer) for example uses DDR-2400.... (The latest Mac Pro uses 1866 for comparison).

great tip! added to the build notes repository.

scook · Post by **scook** » Fri May 13, 2016 12:52 pm

Based on the previous report, I was hesitant to try the beta but can report it works OK in latest SONAR Platinum here running Win10 on an i7-4790K.

Andrew Souter · Post by **Andrew Souter** » Fri May 13, 2016 12:56 pm

both reports of "not working" above are on CPUs which don't have AVX. So that was expected at the moment, and my mistake for not mentioning this in the previous notes...

Andrew Souter · Post by **Andrew Souter** » Fri May 13, 2016 4:23 pm

well actually OSX builds went a lot quicker than anticipated and we have them working now already. I notice a couple (OSX-specific) oddities we should clean up first though before giving them out...

lxegs · Post by **lxegs** » Fri May 13, 2016 4:55 pm

Thanks for the answer.

Is it possible to have the beta build without avx for my system ?

Thx

Andrew Souter · Post by **Andrew Souter** » Fri May 13, 2016 5:16 pm

lxegs wrote:Thanks for the answer.

Is it possible to have the beta build without avx for my system ?

Thx

we need to study this particular topic a little more to determine what the best way to handle this is...

Daags · Post by **Daags** » Fri May 13, 2016 10:15 pm

Derp. I should have checked links sooner, but the initial quotes listing only Intel CPUs threw me at first.
My AMD (A6 5200) CPU supports AVX (1).

Huzzah!

Perhaps this update helps other AMD users who may have mistakenly thought they were not invited to the party.

AMD CPUs that have AVX:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_ ... s_with_AVX

Bulldozer-based processor, Q4 2011
Piledriver-based processor, Q4 2012
Steamroller-based processor, Q1 2014
Excavator-based processor, expected in 2015
Jaguar-based processor
Puma-based processor

Galbanum wrote: Yes, actually I should have mentioned that. This version of KS requires a CPU with AVX instructions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_ ... Extensions

That includes:

Sandy Bridge processor, Q1 2011
Sandy Bridge E processor, Q4 2011
Ivy Bridge processor, Q1 2012
Ivy Bridge E processor, Q3 2013
Haswell processor, Q2 2013
Haswell E processor, Q3 2014
Broadwell processor, Q4 2014
Broadwell E processor, expected in 2016
Skylake processor, Q3 2015
Kaby Lake processor, expected in 2016
Cannonlake processor, expected in 2017
Performance is even better on CPUs that have AVX 2.0:

Haswell processor, Q2 2013
Haswell E processor, Q3 2014
Broadwell processor, Q4 2014
Broadwell E processor, expected in 2016
Skylake processor, Q3 2015
Kaby Lake processor, expected in 2016
Cannonlake processor, expected in 2017

Andrew Souter · Post by **Andrew Souter** » Tue May 17, 2016 5:58 pm

Hi Guys,

Another Win Beta to try: b475

http://www.designersound.com/product_in ... cts_id=116

Changes:

1) This version now has three different dlls to target different CPUs: one for older SSE CPUs, one for AVX CPUs, and one AVX2 CPUs. (AVX was 2011 CPUs, AVX was 2013 CPUs and newer from Intel and AMD basically...) So it should now work on all common CPUs.

2) A few bug fixes as reported.

If you have a pre 2011 CPU (i.e. it does not have AVX) please try it and let us know. We no longer have CPUs this old to test on ourselves.

We should have OSX versions of all of these tomorrow as well!!

-Andrew

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