Hi all
I have just installed a pcie 424 card and a venerable 2408 mk1 in an intel quadcore 2 gig ram machine running cubase sx and have a few questions someone might like to answer.
If I reduce buffers to below 256 I get a substantial hit on the vst performance meter......is this normal?......what buffer settings do you use?...I run a mix of MIDI, vsti and (around ) 25 mono audio tracks 16bit 48khz.
If I enable all inputs/outputs on the pcie I again notice an increase in cpu hit on the cubase meter but not on windows meter.
Are there Motu pcie 424 specific optimisations to decrease this cpu consumption?
thanx
pciE 424 +cpu load
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Discussion related to installation, configuration and use of MOTU hardware such as MIDI interfaces, audio interfaces, etc. with Windows
Discussion related to installation, configuration and use of MOTU hardware such as MIDI interfaces, audio interfaces, etc. with Windows
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billruys
- Posts: 193
- Joined: Thu Apr 05, 2007 7:13 pm
- Primary DAW OS: MacOS
- Location: New Zealand
- Contact:
I can't comment on cubase, as I'm a Sonar guy, but I am also running a PCIe-424 on a quad-core box.
Pretty much regardless of host application, dropping your effective latency by reducing your ASIO buffer size will always increase your CPU utilisation when using softsynths & FX - so yes, this is normal.
It is always up to us as users to determine how low we need our latency and what CPU penalty we're willing to pay for it. Having said that, a quad-core machine should have power to burn.
How many FX/Synths do you have in your project? What numbers are you hitting with your performance meter?
Also, enabling more ins/outs will have a CPU hit, but it should be minimal. In Sonar I can choose whether or not it will open all inputs & outputs. Choosing not to reduces the cost of having more I/Os enabled.
Pretty much regardless of host application, dropping your effective latency by reducing your ASIO buffer size will always increase your CPU utilisation when using softsynths & FX - so yes, this is normal.
It is always up to us as users to determine how low we need our latency and what CPU penalty we're willing to pay for it. Having said that, a quad-core machine should have power to burn.
How many FX/Synths do you have in your project? What numbers are you hitting with your performance meter?
Also, enabling more ins/outs will have a CPU hit, but it should be minimal. In Sonar I can choose whether or not it will open all inputs & outputs. Choosing not to reduces the cost of having more I/Os enabled.
thanks for responding.
I seem to have found the problem and I'm posting here so that anyone who comes across the same problem might benefit.
Turns out it was a (possibly ) faulty sata drive.
I have 3 hds.....1 system 2 audiofiles 3 samples.
hd2 was the culprit.Windows xp never reported any errors and chdsk was ok however for some reason , transfer rate was slowing down and bogging down the entire machine.I replaced the sata drive with an ide drive and the system is now flying.Question remains as to the exact nature of the fault as it could also be the sata controller/chipset etc, however hd1 is also sata and works fine . I have a 650w psu so I doubt it was a power problem.
thanks again for any input
I seem to have found the problem and I'm posting here so that anyone who comes across the same problem might benefit.
Turns out it was a (possibly ) faulty sata drive.
I have 3 hds.....1 system 2 audiofiles 3 samples.
hd2 was the culprit.Windows xp never reported any errors and chdsk was ok however for some reason , transfer rate was slowing down and bogging down the entire machine.I replaced the sata drive with an ide drive and the system is now flying.Question remains as to the exact nature of the fault as it could also be the sata controller/chipset etc, however hd1 is also sata and works fine . I have a 650w psu so I doubt it was a power problem.
thanks again for any input
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billruys
- Posts: 193
- Joined: Thu Apr 05, 2007 7:13 pm
- Primary DAW OS: MacOS
- Location: New Zealand
- Contact:
It is possible that the disk is just faulty, but there is one thing you should check...
It is possible that the drive was operating in PIO mode instead of native Serial ATA mode (equivalent to DMA mode for IDE).
If either a SATA or regular IDE drive is in PIO mode, you will see very high CPU overhead whenever that disk is doing a lot of I/O. This is because in PIO (programmed input/output) mode, the CPU has to manage the entire transaction between memory and disk. In DMA mode there is an initial set up, but then transfer happens independent of the CPU.
In device manager, expand out the disk controllers and then look at the primary and secondary channels of the appropriate SATA controller. If the transfer mode is set to PIO, you are in for poor performance and high CPU usage.
Of course, now that you have swapped out the disk, you'd need to reinstall it to check. (And just re-installing it could cause it to be re-discovered and switch back to SATA or DMA mode anyway).
My day job is IT geek and I have seen this problem a number of times over the years. If it ever happens to the system drive, the whole machine goes very slow. But on an audio disk, you will just see high CPU and glitchy performance.
It is possible that the drive was operating in PIO mode instead of native Serial ATA mode (equivalent to DMA mode for IDE).
If either a SATA or regular IDE drive is in PIO mode, you will see very high CPU overhead whenever that disk is doing a lot of I/O. This is because in PIO (programmed input/output) mode, the CPU has to manage the entire transaction between memory and disk. In DMA mode there is an initial set up, but then transfer happens independent of the CPU.
In device manager, expand out the disk controllers and then look at the primary and secondary channels of the appropriate SATA controller. If the transfer mode is set to PIO, you are in for poor performance and high CPU usage.
Of course, now that you have swapped out the disk, you'd need to reinstall it to check. (And just re-installing it could cause it to be re-discovered and switch back to SATA or DMA mode anyway).
My day job is IT geek and I have seen this problem a number of times over the years. If it ever happens to the system drive, the whole machine goes very slow. But on an audio disk, you will just see high CPU and glitchy performance.