So I recently got my new soundcard RME Fireface UCX.
Comparing the onboard Soundcard: Realtek High Definition Audio and the new Soundcard: RME Fireface UCX doesnt seem to have any difference in CPU usage.
Changed the Latency, the rate from 44khz & others and no difference either.
The Drivers are up to date and working.
I am using 12 CPU in renoise and changing that to 4 or 6 doesnt change the CPU usage in Renoise either.
Am I missing something here? I dont think a good soundcard like an RME should be using same CPU as the onboard Soundcard, but thats just me.
Also, Im getting +25% in CPU usage from 1 VST instrument?
My CPU is a i7-4960X @ 3.6Ghz, 64bit Windows 7 Ultimate.
It seems imposcar is pretty cpu hungry. Tried the demo. When i’m playing some notes, the cpu usage increase up to 25%.
I’m using an i7 3770k with propellerheads balance audio interface.
If you want to notice the difference between using 4 or 12 cpu’s, simply run more heavy VSTI’s simultaneously and then you will start noticing some real differences.
If you only use one vsti, there is not much else for Renoise to assign to other cores.(each vst plugin gets its own core, but beware:mutli cpu plugins that handle their core assignments themselves is something Renoise can’t control either)
Complaining? Im more worried than complaining. Chill.
Could you elaborate please?
Also like stated above, changing latencies and to Direct sound on the RME and Motherboard soundcard doesnt change anything in any song.
Edit: By saying nothing i mean, It changes just by a few 1~3% Would expect more.
Performance wise, the UCX latencies are basically the same with USB & Firewire thanks to RME’s drivers. But im not talking about latencies here, im talking CPU usage & switching from UCX to Onboard Motherboard Soundcard difference.
Older soundcards used to have their own audioram which used those buffers instead of bothering the system with that. Also the audiocard usually has some processing power of its own thus saving the main cpu some resources. But nowadays, experience of a good soundcard is more or less just the higher sound quality, more inputs and outputs and lower latency for recording.
I really suspect that this one plugin somehow eats up cpu power for its internal processing rather than audio output and you can then even have a 5000$ audiocard:cpu consumption will not lower. Hence my suggestion to use more VST plugins because then you are really testing out the core load on the cpu.
there may be even scenarios where multicore CPU’s perform worse than single core ones, primarily because multithreading has a computation cost by itself
This is indeed what i was seeing with my older EMU-1616m soundcard.
Enabling the ASIO on that card reduced the CPU usage in renoise by around 30% so I was expecting that or even more with this soundcard.
I thought maybe renoise didnt know how to handle the RME drivers or passed through those cards into the onboard card instead.
Loading 4 impOSCar2 and having them play at the same time wont increase the CPU usage in renoise, it stays at 30% or so, thats interesting.
Latencies are no problems with the RME though, Im worried Renoise doesnt recognize the soundcard ram or cpu and just went straight for my onboard with CPU.
It-Alien, thanks for that info
Yeah, Going from a 4 CPU to 12 CPU didnt bring the speedup i was expecting so i got worried something might be wrong with my system or Renoise not supporting 12 or Extreme intel chipset.
i’ll fiddle around with it more and see what results i’ll get with more CPU heavy songs.
The sound-card or driver usually can not reduce the CPU usage. But settings like buffer sizes and sample rate can make a big difference: the lower the buffer size the higher the CPU usage, the higher the sample rate, the higher the CPU usage.
Soundcards, be they internal or external, simply is just a DAC/ADC. Taktik clearly said anything you need to know about that issue. Even Apogee hi end class cards or Metric Halo which costs thousands of dollars don’t do anything special to take the stress off the cpu.
If you want something special go for UAD powered audio interfaces from Univeral Audio like Apollo or Apollo Twin.
