Reaper and CPU Load

[lockheart]

Last New Year's Eve, I recorded the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra in concert, with Reaper & 16MB, of ram. The CPU meter showed 17%, and that's recording 102 instruments and Nancy Graham.

[Mutant]

16MB ?

[JimmiG]

DIVA has been multicore for over two months now it has the option for it this works really well if you only run one demanding instrument in your DAW. DIVA with the multicore enabled sucks away all the CPU from the other tracks. I find it better to run lots of demanding instruments with DIVAs mulicore turned off.

The most ideal way is to have each track run on its own core. Six core CPUs exist but they depend on how a DAW alocates a core or thread.

I use Diva in multi-threaded mode while designing sounds in a single instance. Once I have the sounds I like, I switch to Fast mode and turn off multi-threading, or just freeze the track.

Still, DAWs in general are actually quite good for multi-core CPUs. Each track with its instruments and insert effects can run on its own core, so as long as their total CPU usage isn't more than a single core can handle, you'll be fine. Of course if you use more than six tracks on a 6-core system, audio chains need to start sharing cores which is why 16+ core systems will be great when they become affordable.

Finally with AMD CPUs (I have a Phenom II X4), you *must* disable Cool n Quiet when working with DAWs. Otherwise cores with relatively low usage will drop to ~800 MHz frequency which will cause jitter, dropouts and latency. Once the DAW decides to throw a bunch of threads at an idle core, it will always take a short amount of time to throttle up. This is not instant. By disabling Cool n Quiet, you force all your cores to always run at the highest frequency. You can easily turn CnQ off and on by switching to "High Performance" under Power Options, or you can permanently disable it in your sytem's BIOS setup.