Stuttering audio with large GUI (Win10x64)

Help, Support & Bugs
1

Has anyone else experienced severely stuttering audio after maximizing the Renoise GUI on a 4k screen? I’m guessing that my drivers or hardware are at fault somehow, but I’m not sure, so I thought I’d ask if it happened to someone else.

  • I’ve disabled GUI scaling since I don’t wanna use it.

  • My gfx card is onboard (intel HD 4600). Perhaps it’s too weak?

  • Everything works OK when using a 1920x1080 screen (or ugly GUI scaling on 4k). The larger the Renoise window gets, the more crackles.

  • Limiting framerate to 5fps (in preferences) seems to make it better, but not good enough.

  • I think I’ve updated all drivers… I also tried some DPC latency monitor, but it didn’t reveal anything that I could understand.

Any ideas?

2

Did you check the gpu load?

Also try to check your dpc latency for driver issues:http://www.resplendence.com/latencymon (try to update drivers, which are causing huge dpc latency)

3

The GPU load is 2% with Renoise in the background. With Renoise maximized on a 4k screen and scrolling, GPU load is 30%. Should it really be that heavy?

(As I said, I tried looking for driver issues by checking DPC latency + device disable witch hunting.)

4

Hi Joule, just a couple of comments…

Your built-in graphics card is not very powerful, but Renoise is not extraordinarily heavy for a high resolution (but 4K is a high resolution). Maybe the power of the graphics card has to do (I suspect it is the cause).

But, I want to discuss possible causes of choppy audio. When this occurs, a probable cause may be poor regulation of CPU-GPU temperature. This CPU has the integrated GPU on the same chip. The temperature must be correct. If it warms up more than it should, the same processor may order lower performance to not overheat, and here comes the audio cut. You can have the perfect sound card, the right graphics processor, but if the temperature regulation fails, you can have performance problems.I supose your temperature is right, but it would be nice to keep an eye on this.This problem is common in laptops.

Anyway, you can do a simple test. Check that same PC with an HD monitor (1920 x 1080), without changing anything of the configuration, to see if the audio continues to chop. If it works correctly, you will have a graphical performance problem with 4K.As you have already done the test, it seems logical to think that your integrated GPU is not powerful enough to move Renoise in 4K, and more, if the song is complex.

You also have to consider other things. Renoise can swallow a lot of resources if you use lots of memory to load VST / VSTi as well. So that the total load is not only the executable of Renoise, but the executable in charge of processing the VST / VSTi, that goes separately.

5

Temp is fine. Throttling is also disabled.

The problem occur even with no heavy VST(i)/fx.

Also, Studio One is running normally in 4k. The gfx card shouldn’t really be a problem (but might be with Renoise?)
I’m mainly curious if this is a Win10/driver prob of some sort. Can anyone confirm that Renoise x64 runs smoothly in Win10 with 4k resolution? (No scaling & full screen!)

6

… Can anyone confirm that Renoise x64 runs smoothly in Win10 with 4k resolution? (No scaling & full screen!)

I can not help you here. I do not have a 4K monitor.Let’s see if we are lucky and someone can help.Anyway, Renoise, as it is now and unscaled, must be a visual hell in a 4K (unless the monitor size is too large).If all goes well, very soon I will get a 27" 2K monitor and I worry about how Renoise will look on such a monitor.Did not you have a 2K monitor?

7

Yes, one 2k 25" as well. That’s quite an ok resolution for Renoise imo (unless your eye sight is bad).

Anyway… if someone here is on 4k under Win10, that would be helpful. :slight_smile:

8

joule, check with internal / onboard audio first to ensure it’s nothing usb audio / interrupt whatever related. The Renoise GUI almost is fully software driven (see it in compatibility mode where it behaves the same!). Maybe there is some basic gfx driven blitting / scaling, I don’t know. On macOS it seems to simply scale 2x and then pretty behaves identical. But of course there are no driver or interrupt issues here. The Renoise GUI pretty sure that’s why can be quite a CPU hog (but well performing for such a software driven gui). If you use a PCIe audio card, put it in another slot (irqs will change then). Else I have no idea. Oh maybe leave one core then for gui, so select 7 for audio or something, in the Renoise settings. HD4600 should be more than enough.

9

… La tarjeta gfx no debería ser realmente un problema (¿pero podría ser con Renoise?)
…

This makes one wonder.We all know that resolutions 4K or higher are not the ideal scenario for Renoise 3, in the absence of an important update of the GUI, as marked “a possible roadmap future”.

Therefore, Renoise may not be highly optimized for certain GPU models that are not very powerful along with high resolutions, 4K or higher…I’m almost convinced that with a more powerful PC (dedicated PCIe sound card and dedicated PCIe graphics card), I should not have any problems at 4K.

Have you tried doing a neat reinstallation of Renoise?For that you have to make sure to remove any traces of the previous installation…

As they told me a long time ago, Renoise prioritizes the audio before the GUI so the audio always should sounds good, even though the GUI shows “slight delays” when playing the song. When there are audio cuts, it seems reasonable to think that it is not able to support both scenarios, the prioritization of audio along with playback in the GUI (and this is due to poorly optimized drivers or to the hardware itself, or theoptimization of Renoise or even Windows 10 (do not stop having updates, for something will be)).This seems to translate into a hardware problem, probably performance, unbalanced PC to run Renoise in 4K or driver problems/bad installation or even configuration.Then, it is possible that Studio One works well, since it is more optimized for these resolutions with less powerful hardware and have correct all software installation and drivers.

Having said all these thoughts, it seems reasonable, if is possible, to try changing the hardware to see if it works better or not.I doubt there is any user currently using Renoise + 4K or higher that can help here, unfortunately.

It would also be reasonable for you to specify your main hardware:

  1. Desktop or laptop pc?
  2. CPU
  3. GPU
  4. RAM
  5. sound card (integrated, USB, PCIe??)
  6. model of monitor (features?)

Maybe with more data from your hardware, people know howbetter to help you…

10

It turns out the problem is isolated to one sound card (Firewire). Not sure why…

I’ll just have to use another output when playing audio under 4k! :slight_smile:

12

It turns out the problem is isolated to one sound card (Firewire). Not sure why…

Different default buffer lengths? Also (assuming ASIO), did you try increasing the buffer size?

Edit: also, what’s your sample rate?

13

@taktik That still happens to a new(?) user in the renoise chat. Here is some interesting read by Urs: https://www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=7978591#p7978591