My PC is using an older graphics card (Radeon RX 570) with DDR5 RAM and 4G of memory. My PC is also using the 3.0 PCIe bus, not the newer 4.0 PCIe bus. SL11 Pro works OK, but Robin has suggested 6G and, well, no one is making these video cards anymore.
However, there is suddenly an opportunity on eBay in the used market that I’ve never seen before, the AMD Radeon Pro WX7100 graphics card using DDR5 RAM with 8G of memory. I also can confirm that AMD is still offering the latest drivers for these cards, unlike some of the lesser cards, and I will assume this is because in the day, this was an expensive card ($630 according to a Tom’s Hardware review). Great.
We can assume that all of these are pulls from company machines that were upgraded, but they don’t say. This is old tech at this point, afterall. There are many listings currently, that’s all I do know, and they are very inexpensive, $100 typically. For my needs this will do the job. If your situation is like mine and you’re trying to find a video card with more processing power, then maybe take a look on eBay.
I was weighing out buying a new GFX card for my machine verses purchase of CuBase13 Pro for 50% off…I had to go CuBase because GFX cards I was looking at KalmX GeForce 3050 are not going up in future…likely the other way
This is a 6GB card and so far, works OK with SL11 … I know, 8GB recommended, but somehow this does the job. I wanted an upgrade for my otherwise rock-solid Skylake rig and this was about €200. Still available. https://videocardz.net/palit-geforce-rtx-3050-6gb-kalmx
I think it’s a laptop chip in card format, and may somehow be using shared memory. In any case, I’m happy enough with the performance and it’s fanless and uses <70W and therefore needs no special power connector.
I’ve now installed the (new for me) used AMP WX 7100 (8G) video card. Running SL Pro 11 and doing an unmix of a Danny Gatton/Joey DeFrancisco song called ‘Blues on the Half Shell’ (Relentless album), the resultant AUDIO results seemed better than on my previous AMD Radeon RX570 4G card. Is this possible?
The time that SLPro 11 took was 9:10 mins. It was a 6:56 mins song from a 160 kbps MP3 file. I’m pleased with the new card.
As a test, I unmixed it (without vocals, it’s an instrumental) using the following settings:
… but it doesn’t seem to have used the GPU at all?
Processing took about 9 minutes (manually timed), so about the same.
I just tested the same song (320kbps MP3)
It took approx. 5 min to extract, using every stem and extreme process.
AMD 7900x and RTX 3050 8Gb, and it does use GPU, SL 11.0.10 SA
I´ll update to 11.0.20 and see if it makes difference
E: After update, 6 minutes and using GPU, funnily it also shows that it´s using AMD´s integrated GPU too, though only few percents
Also, Jari, when I open my GPU performance display in the Task Man, I see the dedicated 8GB of the graphics card, but I also see that there is 32GB of ‘Shared GPU memory usage’. Does the graphics card borrow from the CPU memory? This didn’t show up in your page display. My PC is idle in this picture shot, But I can also share that when I am running SLPro and doint the unmix of Blues on the Half Shell, my GPU processor is running 50-93% of it’s memory.
This time I select “All” preset and “Extreme”, timing was about the same.
[UPDATE] Selecting only Bass, Drums and Guitar finished in 7 minutes, using less GPU RAM (~3.6GB) and about the same “work” showing up on the “Graphics_1” graph.
This card is really a cut-down version, with I suspect a laptop chip, and only 6GB of dedicated RAM, yet it’s doing much better than expected – and fanless!
Mr.Soundman, I see something in your graph that is different than mine. Your top window says ‘Graphics_1’ and mine says ‘3D’. Why do you think this is?
On another note, I did a song ‘unmix’ and I changed the setting to ‘High’, rather than ‘Extreme’. The results were a very quick runtime and an audio result that doesn’t seem that different than the ‘Extreme’ result.
Another thing I noticed (all the while using the Task Manager with the GPU graphs open) is that just playing the unmix back, the GPU 3D graph is just as busy as when it’s unmixing a song. ? So then I switched (within the ‘System’ pulldown tab in the SLPro) to use CPU instead of GPU _JUST FOR PLAYBACK OF AUDIO IN SLPRO…and the 3D graph was just as busy (50%) as when I did an unmix at ‘High’. OK, then I played the same song in the WinPlayer and the 3D graph window showed 1% of usage. Q: Why would the SLPro still be using the graphics card when I have changed it’s source to the CPU?
The Task Manager default for GPU is to display “3D”, but you can click on that for a drop-down list. Only when I selected “Graphics_1” did I see the unmixing workload.
I have found that some models work just as well with “High”, but perhaps @Robin_Lobel will explain this better.
Perhaps because it is simply a heavier user of graphics, with the scrolling spectrum display? What you are seeing there is the card doing what it was designed for, i.e. displaying graphics. The selection in Preferences | System is only to choose between CPU and GPU for running the models. During playback, while there is no unmixing going on, there is still some pretty heavy work being done on the display. Again, perhaps Robin will explain why there is a difference in usage compared to WinPlayer when playing back with spectrum display, but I’d imagine it’s because SL needs a lot more accuracy and also needs to dynamically change the display if you vary the FFT parameters.
Just tried unmixing “Blues on the Half Shell” again with only Drums, Bass and Guitar selected, setting quality to “High”, and it completed on the GPU in 1m 17s and the results were actually better than on Extreme.
How the models perform also depends on the source material, so it’s always worth trying different settings. In this case, “High” was better at seperating out the Telecaster and the Hammond (as “Other”), but at the expense of artifacts in the drums, however the bass was also a bit clearer.
On other material, the “Extreme” setting has worked really well for me on vocals, in some cases jaw-droppingly good, and better than any other tool I’ve tried. Yes, it takes a long time on my little card, but, as they say, “you’re worth it”!
In most case, High will get you 98% there. The Extreme mode is called that way because it takes an extreme amount of time to grab a couple extra percents in quality by doing extra passes. Which in some case is unnecessary, and in other can help with difficult cases.
