Win10 and DP

[oshtakuta]

Hi! I ask any help in setting up windows10 for the work of DP.

[terrybritton]

You would do well to read through this free book from the creator of Cantabile:
https://www.cantabilesoftware.com/glitchfree/

Terry

[oshtakuta]

Thank you!

[bayswater]

Terry, that's an interesting read. I wonder how much of this would apply similarly to Mac OS. In particular, he suggests hyperthreading is not a good thing for audio:

"Some modern processors such as Intel’s i7 processors support a technology called “hyper-threading”. With hyper-threading the CPU has the ability to sometimes run multiple tasks at the same time on one CPU core. So a dual-core hyper-threaded processor can occasionally process 4 tasks at once.

In practice however for most audio applications this often doesn’t work well. This is mainly because all the tasks that an audio program might try to run on separate cores are all trying to do the same thing (typically math operations) and those things can’t be done simultaneously by one processor core.

Using hyper-threading for real-time audio processing can result in a significant loss of performance.

My advice here is if your audio software allows selecting the number of threads to be used for audio processing do not exceed the number physical processor cores.”

[terrybritton]

On the hyperthreading issue, one really has to try it on a program-to-program basis. For instance, Samplitude is apparently now hyperthreading-aware. That is, it assumes that it will be turned on by default and keeps it out of the way where it should and uses it where it can be useful. I do not have any info on DP in this regard, but my guess is that modern software HAS to assume the HT is turned on in the BIOS, and if it is audio software then that audio software should take hyperthreading's likely presence into account.

Terry

[HCMarkus]

I saw something not long ago, I think it was at Macrumors.com or Beergutz, where a fellow ran Logic with and without hyper threading activated. Disabling hyper threading impacted performance negatively. Enabling it allowed significantly more plugins to be simultaneously activated.

[bayswater]

I saw something not long ago, I think it was at Macrumors.com or Beergutz, where a fellow ran Logic with and without hyper threading activated. Disabling hyper threading impacted performance negatively. Enabling it allowed significantly more plugins to be simultaneously activated.

I've tried out Logic with a very high track count and saw the same thing. But only with Instrument tracks. With straight audio, I didn't see any difference. This is why I was interested in the claim that hyperthreading can decrease performance with audio apps, at least on Windows.

[terrybritton]

Best if you read here on how hyperthreading works:
https://superuser.com/questions/122536/ ... es-it-work

I liked this part:

"Hyper-Threading is where two threads are able to run on one single-threaded core. When a thread on the core in question is stalling or in a halt state, hyper-threading enables the core to work on a second thread instead.

Hyper-threading makes the OS think that the processor has double the number of cores, and often yields a performance improvement, but only in the region of 15-30% overall - though in some circumstances, there may actually be a performance hit (=<20%)."

The hyperthreading core does act like a parallel processor, but only if there is idle time on the main core, since it is borrowing idle (halt) and stall time from the main core to have room to do its work. Whenever both cores require the use of a single-threaded support processor, like a math co-processor, then one still has to wait until the other is finished. In math-intensive situations with high real-time demands, this is where performance can actually be diminished. (Think reverbs, some limiters and EQ's, etc.) It is the real-time demands of audio that makes this challenging, as all the work being done has to be finished in the span of a buffer setting's time frame! Not as critical during mixing as it is during tracking for most situations except for when using always-real-time, math-intensive plugins as mentioned above.

Hard to know sometimes which is the best approach to take, as our software handles different situations differently and some combinations of plugins and other activities are going to affect how the prioritizations work.

Terry