13700k and Ableton 11, why it works better run as Admin?

[legendCNCD]

Just chiming in to say, although nobody asked, that there are no issues whatsoever on MacOS.

Just saying, but oh there are various other issues, like whole OS getting stuck for TENS of seconds when CPU power runs out, where we wait for it to recover. There are no issues whatsoever on Windows when this happens. Sound crackles but OS works properly...

Now back to normal talk ->

[dentaku]

To the OP,

What are you GPU settings? Sometimes they cause the problems.

It's the onboard video that comes with this Z790 board.
I tried it with an old Nvidia PCIE card I found in my collection of stuff and it didn't help.

[dentaku]

It crackled a bit running as a regular user but not as bad as when a simple web browser is running.

There's no such thing as a "simple web browser" anymore. They are now all RAM-hungry, multi-threaded hydras from out of the depths! They use far more resources than your average DAW. It's all seriously out of control...

Try Opera! Set it up properly and you will have no issue with RAM starvation. Typing this from parents' 8 year old laptop with core duo, 4gb of RAM and have about 120 tabs "open" (well Opera does not load all the tabs unless you click on them). It comes with built in VPN as well.

I did some more experimenting this morning and while browsers are the worse I can get the sound to mess up if I snap Performance Monitor to the top of the screen.
I do wonder if it's a GPU problem but like I said earlier, I also tried using an Nvidia card instead of the on-board Intel video and it was the same.
Because browsers are the worse culprit I even tried disabling Ethernet, WiFi and Bluetooth but that doesn't help.

[syntonica]

Just chiming in to say, although nobody asked, that there are no issues whatsoever on MacOS.

Just saying, but oh there are various other issues, like whole OS getting stuck for TENS of seconds when CPU power runs out, where we wait for it to recover. There are no issues whatsoever on Windows when this happens. Sound crackles but OS works properly...

Now back to normal talk ->

He's obviously never been visited by the Spotlight Fairy while trying to render in real-time. CoreAudio is great and all until some bully process comes along and ruins it.

It's been awhile since I've used Windows, but I'd always go in and turn off all the garbage processes I didn't need. It's tedious, and I'm not even sure that it's necessary anymore.

[Mfs2020]

I was considering a similar build so would like to know you've fixed this before proceeding!

I had a similar issue with my older pc stuttering and oddly it was fixed by disabling the fast startup/fast shutdown options in Windows. Apparently these modes cache some driver related stuff which can cause issues on restart. Check out these settings and see if disabling fast start/shutdown helps.

[Blaster]

Where have you installed Ableton Live? The default is ProgramData:

The permissions on the ProgramData directory (and the default permissions on subdirectories) allow any user to create new directories and files. This means you can create a directory at runtime without elevation, so your installer does not need to do it for you.

[dentaku]

It seems that other people are having the same problems on modern systems and also finding that it works better set to Balanced and that running Live as admin fixes the problem when the power plan is set to High.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ableton/commen ... 12_update/

[dentaku]

I was considering a similar build so would like to know you've fixed this before proceeding!

I had a similar issue with my older pc stuttering and oddly it was fixed by disabling the fast startup/fast shutdown options in Windows. Apparently these modes cache some driver related stuff which can cause issues on restart. Check out these settings and see if disabling fast start/shutdown helps.

I just tried and it made no difference.

[dentaku]

I just did a few more suggested setting changes and nothing helped so I decided to change something in the BIOS I've wondered about from the start... turning off the e-cores.
LEGACY GAME MODE parks and un-parks the e-cores if you press Scroll Lock on my Asus Z790 motherboard.
With the e-cores parked Live 11 doesn't glitch while I'm doing other things like using a browser.
If I un-park them it will start glitching again after a few seconds as the e-cores start being used again.

Obviously I'd like to be able to use ALL the cores on my 13700k so running Live as administrator is still the best thing I can do but at least this shows that this has something to do with Live 11 on Win 11 not liking the different cores on 12th and 13th gen Intel processors.

[dentaku]

For fun, I ran Cinebench R23 with the e-cores parked and I went from 30000 to 21000.
Those extra 8 cores make a big difference.

[dentaku]

I can confirm the difference between running Live as admin vs not admin, specially while changing windows. I will report to support this at it seems like a bug.

But I wonder if there are more differences to this performance bug.

I discovered something last night that I had been thinking about the whole time.
Beyond running as administrator it also works to park all e-cores.
There's a setting in the BIOS called Legacy Game Mode that let's you stop all the e-cores when you press Scroll Lock.

I can see why this could work because when I tested with Win10, Live had no clue how to use the e-cores so it didn't glitch but the problem happens in Win11 where all the logical processors get used.
Win 10 also barely makes use of even two of the 16 p-cores so Win 11 is still a better choice.
Having to run it as admin isn't a huge deal and at least I get to use all 24 logical cores.

[edeneye]

Is Ableton Live installed in the default directory? I had my install on a separate drive for years and never realized that was holding back the speed of Ableton on Windows.

[dentaku]

Is Ableton Live installed in the default directory? I had my install on a separate drive for years and never realized that was holding back the speed of Ableton on Windows.

It's in the default folder which I belive is in C:/Programdata

[teilo]

Since no one mentioned it, and it's kind of obvious, so pardon me if so: What else are you running on your user account? The first thing I would suspect when there is a significant difference in performance between user accounts is your startup items.

It may also be worth creating a clean user account to determine if this is really an admin account issue, or something that is wrong in your user profile.

[rod_zero]

Since no one mentioned it, and it's kind of obvious, so pardon me if so: What else are you running on your user account? The first thing I would suspect when there is a significant difference in performance between user accounts is your startup items.

It may also be worth creating a clean user account to determine if this is really an admin account issue, or something that is wrong in your user profile.

You don't need another account to run as admin, it is an option in a context menu over any program.