So I have never been able to get really low CPU/DPC latency on my system, I would always get constant small spikes and the occasional huge spike.
I have spent a lot of time trying to improve things over the past few months but as much as I was able to trouble shoot a lot of small issues I could never get it as low as I felt it should be.
After talking to someone on a pro audio facebook page he suggested moving away from NVIDIA to AMD for my GPU as he felt the NVIDIA drivers are pretty awful…
I took a bit of a risk as I have gone for a very new AMD GPU. Radeon RX5700. My old card is an Asus GTX950 Strix.
I removed all the NVIDIA drivers before removing the old card using Display Driver Uninstaller.
Had the usual upgrade injuries, banged my head on the studio desk and managed to remove the skin on a few knuckles but had a pretty straight forward upgrade.
So my system performance with the new GPU. I am blown away!
My CPU latency has dropped, is stable and no big spikes. The occasional rise and falls but stayed well in the green with all the latency tests I ran.
I am able to run busy projects in C10 that would previously need a buffer of 1024 at 64 with a stable output. At 64 my real time peak is only just passing my average load on occasion and at 128 it isn’t even getting close.
This is a night and day difference and it feels almost like I have upgraded the whole system.
For those who want more info on the system.
i7-6950X clocked to 4GHz, 64Gig Ram, RME ReyDat, MSI X99A XPower Gaming Titanium
And since the topic is what it is I’ll just add this:
The new AMD Ryzen 3900x offers:
98.8% of the performance of a 9960x at about 30% of the cost!..
110% the performance of the 9940x at about 37% of the cost!..
33% the performance of the 9900k at a 3% premium.
I can second your enthusiasm for AMD gpu’s over Nvidia. I had a stable system with the occasional big spike. I still have the big spike from something I can’t figure out, but once I changed from nvidia to a rx 580 card my average latency dropped from 70-80 to 20-35 according to latencymon
Thanks for posting your experiences.
In the past I chose Nvidea over AMD Gpu’s because of stability with video tasks & better driver updates.
But after hearing about spikes & nvidea driver issues with audio,
I think I should go AMD route too then for my next daw machine.
Dropping your latency from 70-80 to 20-30 is quite significant.
Glad to see you’ve solved your issue & have perf. gains
Thanks for sharing info & link Mattias.
I was already wondering how cubase would behave on the new AMD chips,
if it takes full advantage already or if cubase needs an optimization adjustment via an update.
Particularly regarding the 3900x 12core & upcoming 3950x 16core released in september.
The past few weeks I’ve dived deep into the technical details of the AMD3000 series Cpu’s, discussing performance with enthusiast overclockers.
How the CPU clocks it’s Infinite Fabric system bus latency ratio’s, it’s dependence on memory speeds, and the resulting system stress & overclocking capabilities.
There’s alot going on with the cpu & motherboard, & I have knowledge to share about it,
and maybe some suggestions how we might go about it to boost cubase performance on these chips.
But where do I share? Or where would I best post this technical explanation on the forum?
It’s also vital info for configurating hardware components to get the best out of an AMD 3rd Gen cpu.
Thanks in advance.
As mentioned before ASRock will release a motherboard with Thunderbolt 3 for the AMD x570 platform. Not that I need to it personally, but that was the only thing some people building DAWs wanted. Don’t know how latency difference is between TB3 and USB soundcards really. I very happy with my RME Digiface USB.
I hope to see some motherboard and memory benchmarks and comparisons soon. 3900x seems to be available in late july/early august here… Can only make pre-orders. Maybe I will wait for 3950x benchmarks…
It is probably necessary to switch to Windows 10 1903 which has improvements for handling “many” cores and the AMD platform. I’ve tested Win10 1903 on a testmachine and seems stable for me. Will have to test Cubase 9.5 and 10 side-by-side to see if there is any difference there aswell. Don’t really need any of the new features in Cubase 10 to be honest, but if Cubase 10 is performing better I have to buy the upgrade I guess.
I’ve been using AMD/Radeon graphics cards for 10+ years and for the reasons listed in the first post here - Nvidia takes way too much control of the OS. I found it even affected my mouse operation. I still see ppl using Nvidia and I don’t get it.
can you confirm which AMD Radeon driver you use. I have had my AMD Radeon RX Vega 11 for 12 months and the only way to stop Cubase 9.5 from crashing regularly was to disable the graphics.
Also, I don’t use the AMD Control Center app. The goal is to just use the Driver - but to do this you have to download the whole package, load the drivers, and then remove all the fluff.
Just updated the AMD Driver Version, 26.20.13003.1007 and it seems that AMD has somewhat sorted the fluff download process. If you are thoughtful and read the suggestions, you can now load just the Driver.
I’m about to build a DAW pc around the new 3950x when it comes out with an aorus X570 master. I was tossing up between an Aorus Nvidia gtx 2060 super 8GB and an AMD Radeon Gx 5700 8GB OC I was going to go with the nividia because I’ve owned two HP laptops hi spec Z books with AMD GPUs that have always given me problems with multiple monitors maybe the 2060 super is the wrong choice ?
I’ve had big complications with Radeon RX 5700 graphics card. Cubase crashes and vanishes suddenly without any error messages or even dump files. This may occur any time from lets say 1 min to 100 min, randomly. I have found no solution while tweaking the settings. Tried disabling almost everything, sound card, change PCIE 4.0 to 3.0 from bios, updating and reinstalling everything, VST:s, licenser softwares… No luck.
Couple of days ago I got a cheap GeForce GT1030 to test and not a single crash since then… So at least my version of RX 5700 don’t work with Cubase.
Are you sure you have updated to the latest AMD drivers and that the fans are running on your graphics card? I had “random” crashes on my system as I had my profile on the graphic card set to silent. turned out my system did shut down due to heat
I am running some games on 4K settings without a problem so I doubt it is the cooling performance (should check though). I had the latest drivers, but now there seems to be newer 20.1.4 drivers so I think I will give it a last shot.
No luck with new drivers and fans are running normally. AMD Adrenaline shows no deviation from normal behavior in the graphs. Is there a way to disable “hardware accreleration” from Cubase? In the old days this helped in some cases…
Yeah, I recently switched to an AMD GPU and the drivers indeed are pretty terrible in terms of stability. Performance is good, stability not.
Or perhaps I should say the drivers are “picky”. Since I ran a software called DDU to remove all old (Nvidia) drivers it has been stable, but until I did that I got black screens followed by a reboot.
