Poor performance or too high expectations? Let's compare.

Hey everyone.

Somehow I find my system performance quite poor. Maybe that’s a given or
I messed something up or… I don’t know…

Here’s the setup:
Asus Sabertooth 990 FX
Athlon FX Bulldozer 8150 3,6 GHz 8-Core
16 Gigabyte Ram
Radeon HD 7950
RME fireface uc
OS is Win7 home premium x64 running of a 1TB Samsung Evo 840
DAW is cubase 8 pro
EVERY SOFTWARE DRIVER AND FIRMWARE IS UP TO DATE! (I just reinstalled due to frustration)

Here’s the performance problem:

I’m running a project with a couple of vstis (Reaktor/battery/2xmassive/retrologue)
And there’s some basic mixing going on.

THAT won’t even play back without clicks and such @ a buffersetting of 1048 samples!!

I think this shouldn’t be a problem with this machine - am I wrong?

Please tell me what kinda workload your machine can handle.

Thanks

Well Reaktor ensembles can eat CPU depending on patch of course

I don’t think that should be a problem for your machine at all.
Mine isn’t as powerful, by the looks of it, and my performance is more than satisfactory.

The VSTs you’ve listed do seem to be heavy hitters as far as CPU usage goes, but not enough to cause the troubles you’re having though.

I usually run several instances of Kontakt 4 & 5, [some of which are quite intense like Kirk Hunter’s Spot Light Strings x 3 separate instances], Ample Sound Guitars x 2, Garritan Aria Player, 2-3 Reverbs, Compressors & a few Eqs - all are VSTs.

About 25-30 MIDI tracks. A few audio tracks.

Nothing bounced - all raw processing as it plays along.

Plus I can record new MIDI tracks through to any VST without any noticeable latency with my setting at either 256 or 512 - [can’t remember which one it’s at right now].

My performance meter never even gets up to half way - more like 20-30%.

I could easily add a bunch more stuff, but I never seem to need that many tracks.

Seems there’s something else that’s going there that needs to be addressed.

Have you check out the various articles, tips & tricks to tweak your system to optimize it for audio streaming and production?

Give these steps a shot:

http://www.sweetwater.com/sweetcare/articles/pc-optimization-guide-for-windows-7/

Hi,

Try to test your system via LatencyMon (free utility).

With PCs, it’s always difficult. One component can significantly affects and slows down the whole system.

Reaktor could be very CPU consuming, depends on the sound. Battery could be very RAM consuming, depends on the library.

TIP: start taskmanager and monitor for programs which do burst your CPU load, it can happen that devices like USB controllers, network interfaces, video boards interrupts your system bad so they can have priority. This will be obvious when related software causes cpu burst in your taskmanager (performance tab).

Latency checker says everything is fine.

I thought maybe it’s a USB problem and I should get a pci usb fats to avoid the onboard controler.!?

so just to clear this up i little.
i work in music production for almost 20 years now.
most of the time i’ve used windows machines since i’m not an apple kinda guy.
for the most part i know what i’m doing - even when it comes to setting up a daw and building a computer.

i ran very big productions with lots of tracks and processing on the prior machines and i really think here’s
something terribly wrong. i just dont see it.

has anyone similar setup? id really like to compare…

lust but not least thanks for the answers. i appreciate that!



best

ilan

i’ll try and disable usb power management and uac. the rest that they mention i did already.

thank you for the link

In Cubase 7.5, there is the option to turn ASIO Guard per VST instrument, as well as Globally.

This was a suggestion that someone from Steinberg mentioned on here last year sometime.

Can you try that?

[I haven’t actually looked for it in Cubase 8 Pro, because I’ve never needed to do it.]