Dual Core Cpu Support

Ideas & suggestions
1

I have asked this before but havent got any answer :(

So, is dual core support planned feature for renoise? (i mean in reasonably near future, like 1 year or something)

Im building new comp and want to decide between single or dual core athlon 64!! Cause if it is not planned then i will be better off not spendind extra money right now, but if it is planned then it would be great to have dual core for extra processing power!!

Pliiiizzzzzz dvelopers, give us some comment!!! :dribble:

2

There will be loads of other good reason to go for the dual core CPU anyway. E.g. VST’s that does support dual core CPU’s or support for load balancing separate applications like MIDI-bus adapters or other process consuming applications outside Renoise that can be controlled platform wise rather than host-application controlled.

I thought have read past responses of existing dual cpu users that mentioned Renoise acting more steady with two cpu’s.

I just couldn’t find the topic that quickly anymore.

3

Perhaps it’s possible to use EnergyXT in Renoise as a vst(i) distributer to different cores?
In eXT (beta) you choose which core to use in each vst plugin.

From XT forums about next upcoming version:

4

I have tried the eXT beta in some other hosts, and it works.

But if I use Renoise and change the core of a vst(i) inside eXT, renoise will hang and crash.
But I dont have a real dual cpu system at the moment. So I have only tried this on a single hyperthreading core. So this crash might happend because Renoise dont support hyperthreading?

Anyone got a real dual cpu setup to test this?

If so:

  • Download the eXT beta demo from here. (energyXT.zip)
  • Put it in renoise vst folder, start renoise and load eXT as vsti in Renoise.
  • rightclick eXT main window background and select sequencer.
  • Double click the sequencer
  • In the sequencer rightclick the left side of first midi track (just below the Mute/Solo buttons),
    Output - Add - VST - a instrument (if you have not set a vst folder in eXT, then do this in eXT main window, rightclick the background and choose Folders…)
  • In the Main mixer in eXT (the left side of Main window) you will see the vsti you just loaded. Rightclick it and choose core.

Hope this works!
Let us know if it does.

5

thanks for the tip Pysj!

i would appreciate if someone could try it!!!

6

pysj,
did you re-enable the second virtual CPU of your HT CPU for the renoise task?
you can do that from within taskmanager by rightclicking renoise.exe and checking the process affiliation.
renoise disables one of the two virtual CPUs by default to avoid problems with HT.

7

Cool.
It seems to work when both cpu’s are enabled for Renoise.exe
I can see the load changing from one to another as I switch cores for vst(i)'s.
So this should work sweet for real dual cpu’s.

eXT dont add much extra cpu usage for your plugins (about 1.2% on my 3.2GHz) per instance. And you can load as many vst(i)'s you want into each instance.

8

Now I really need to have a play with eXT. Been getting peeved off with only being able to get 50% efficiency. Not even installed it yet though, hope it’s not too step a learning curve ;-/

9

Bump.

I feel that multi core support is an absolute necessity. The two major chip manufacturers are both moving toward multiple cores …

I truly believe that multi core support superscedes any other feature requests in importance!

10

last year I got Athlon64 as I believe there will be support for it… but actually never real support for that processor. now I`ll go dual core. Good question. There will be support for them in a near future?

11

Well, duo core is somehow supported, audio related tasks get one core dedicated and gpu and other activities are set to the other core, but full benefits are not being pulled up to its full extend.
It is at least a lot better than HT as this cpu is completely not supported.

12

You know very well that the overall Renoise performance gains with such threading are trivial, and as such aren’t even worth mentioning.

Quite obviously, the bulk of what Renoise and the VSTs it hosts do are Audio related. Such an environment translates very well to a multi-core scheme. I feel that it is absolutely crucial for Renoise to be able to utilize the full extent of the hardware available to it. As I stated before, I truly believe that multi-core support should be AT THE VERY TOP of the todo list, simply because 2 or more cores are becoming the standard, rather than a novelty.

I really hope that this is as obvious to the dev(s) as it is to me.

13

Yes, it is.

14

:smiley:

15

I think this is pretty important. It is kinda frustrating to think that the o/c on my cpu is really all that has improved performance in terms of Renoise. Especially now this has happened:

http://www.ocworkbench.com/2006/intel/inte…r-QX6700/b1.htm

16

this would really help me out too :)

thanks!

17

Sorry to ask the same question again, but I don’t quite understand this…

If I have a dual core CPU and when Renoise eventually supports it, will I be able to choose what I assign to each core? For example, could I send all VSTs to one core and everything else to the other? I was thinking of getting something like a Powercore but this seems like a better way of doing things…

:)

18

I can only assume that the balancing would be automatic and transparent to the user.

19

Hmmm…

20

Yes, I’ll buy one next month. so I really renoise will get support for this as soon as possible ;)