Dorico 4.0 and Avx

Hello everyone. I apologize if the question may seem silly to those who are software savvy, but for safety I prefer to ask. A few days ago I downloaded a guitar plugin taking advantage of the trial period, and despite having installed everything correctly, the product did not work. I then asked the support for clarification and they replied that having an intel i 5 processor from 2011 I did not have Avx support. Now regarding Dorico 4.0 can this be a limit? Or has it nothing to do with it? Thanks for the support.

I presume that AVX refers to Advanced Vector Extensions, which is a set of CPU instructions that were introduced with Intel’s Sandy Bridge series of CPUs.

If the guitar plug-in uses those CPU instructions, then you need a CPU that can understand them.

Dorico does not mention AVX in the System Requirements for v3.5, so I’d be surprised if it was introduced for D4. But of course you must have a machine that can run Windows 10 or 11 (or MacOS Mojave or greater).

Thanks for your reply, I have windows 10 and 16gb of ram. It’s an old computer but so far it has always worked well, I also don’t think Dorico will ask for this, but not being very experienced it would be interesting to confirm it.

So far as I know neither Dorico 4 nor its audio engine has any new CPU processor instruction requirements, so if Dorico 3.5 runs on your computer at the moment, you should be OK with Dorico 4 as well.

Hi

Just from a developer POV. The kind of decision that tends to lead to this kind of requirement (CPU compatibility, features etc) tends to be hidden to software developers in the development software as various options buried deep in the compiler settings.

I haven’t seen any mainstream development software that gives the developer a shopping list of CPU features to turn on or off.

So, these things can sometimes get inadvertently set, either in the main project, or sometimes in a library that the project uses, which then places a requirement on the product in the end.

I would consider going back to the vendor of the guitar plugin, and ask them to review their “decision” to require AVX. It’s possible it’s not actually a requirement, and that they can tweak compiler settings to enable your system to work. In the end it will come down to how much perceive pain they will see to change it, vs what benefit - that comes down to how many customers they will enable to use their product.

you never know if you don’t ask.

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