Ok, so I bought a new laptop recently. I’m not too sure about if I like win 7, since I think the fancy look probably takes up a lot of resources. But anyway, to see how well the computer itself can handle under “pressure,” I ran the same xrns file on both computers at the same time and compared the CPU % on the top right. At first, both computers are running at the same usage (approx 17%), but as more plugins start to be used in the track, the CPU spikes up on the old laptop (approx 45%) and the new one stays at around 25%. Is there a reason why they both start out at about the same? I thought that it would be less from the get go on the new one.
The specs of the two are as follows:
old:
intel pent4 3.00GHz
2 gb ram
I think it’s 800 fsb
xp sp2
Also, I’ve noticed that when I’m in the sample editor view, the timeline cursor rolls all the way through the sample on the old one and tends to disappear on the new one (sample still plays though). Any reason for that?
The fancy look obviously takes more ressources than what xp used to take, however, you can turn this stuff off… it shouldn’t be too hard, I’m sure there are tons of blog posts about this kind of OS tuning… However, with the quad core you should have plenty of ressources to deal with the OS interface.
I had a pentium 4 3.20 ghz before and this machine wasn’t bad at all to run Renoise… (depending on the plugins, of course)
I’m surprised that they both start at 17%, maybe renoise doesn’t use all of your 4 cores correctly… It should use them tho… You should check this out, there are tools to see which cores are used and how… actually if you open the windows task manager (via ctrl+alt+del) you should get this info…
Maybe your lappy was running other stuff? If you did not format it since you bought it, my guess is that it runs some useless stuff (unrelated to how the OS looks)
I’m not sure how the lappy quad cores work but I know they have some “turbo mode” maybe you can turn that on and see…
One last thing. I’m not surprised that the quad core gets faster in comparison when the plugin kicks in, this cpu is meant for multitasking (plugins could be seen as multitask, really) while the single core isn’t… However it’s surprising that they are both at 17% when the song starts.
If you want to share the xrns (without the plugins, just to test the beginning of the song) I could test it with my desktop quad core (not an i7), which should still be a bit faster than your mobile i7 but if I run it at like 0.5% maybe there’s some problem with your cpu… (I doubt so)
Renoise has to split your song into multiple components that then can be spread to the processors - these components are “tracks” in Renoise.
If you for example have a song with 4 tracks running on 4 CPUs, then the 4 tracks will be distributed to the 4 cores (one track per core at once). But if one of the track has a CPU usage of 20%, while the others have a usage of 1%, theres not much speedup you can get form multiple cores. The more tracks you use, the bigger your songs are the better the load will be balanced though…
This has nothing to do with multi cores, but yes, this indeed flickers more than in 2.1. I already try to find out why exactly…
Not quite, but I’ll look into some of the stuff mentioned when I get home
sorry I didn’t check out the multicore FAQ, but it makes sense.
As for the last thing mentioned, I’m using renoise 2.0 (I’m waiting til 2.5 to update, so skipped 2.1) on both my old and my new laptop. Only my new laptop flickers when watching sample playback.