I’m probably being thick here but I am just trying to get a lid on the following:
In the SpectraLayers 12 user manual is states one of the minimal requriements is
”DirectX 11 compatible graphics card (DirectX 12 with 8GB VRAM or more recommended
for AI processing)”
So if I have a Direct X 12 card with 2GB of video ram should this be adequate if I am not interested in AI processing? Or is unmixing the A.I. processing?
The graphics card I have is adequate for everything else I do with my music pc. Do I have to buy a new graphics card with 8GB VRAM just to keep SpectraLayers happy?
You’ll need more VRAM for the unmixing to run its AI processing on the graphics card instead of the CPU. You can do the unmixing with the CPU, but it will be significantly slower.
Slow I can deal with but the system constantly crashing and rebooting and upsetting Windows 11 is another thing!
I wouldn’t expect SpectraLayers, unmixing or otherwise, or a graphics card to crash Windows 11 in any case, short of maybe having super bad graphics card drivers. What unmixing in SpectraLayers with the AI processing running on the CPU will do, however, is commandeer pretty much your entire system for the amount of time taken to do the unmixing, running all CPUs/threads full out, probably using most (or all? – probably depends on how much you have) of your memory, etc.
How long it will take will likely depend on your CPU. If I’m remembering correctly, doing a typical 3-minute song with my old Windows 10 system (i7 5820k-based, 16 GB RAM, GT640-2GD3 graphics card) took on the order of 45 minutes. On my new Windows 11 system (Core Ultra 9 285K, 64 GB RAM, GeForce RTX 3060 Ventus 2X 12G graphics card), doing a similar unmix was pretty close to real-time (e.g. approximately 3 minutes for a 3-minute song) doing it the AI processing on the graphics card, but it was on the order of 3-4 times that when doing it with the CPU. I’ve heard some suggest it could be up to 10 times slower doing it on the CPU, but maybe they’ve got a higher end graphics card than I do (mine is mid-tier and a generation or two back, I think).
Interestingly my Windows 10 machine takes forever to unmix a song (also running SL12) but it doesn’t crash or randomly reboot! There’s something about Windows 11 that if put through its paces it can’t cope and reboots. It is not a cooling issue as there are loads of fans in there. Both machines have the same graphics card and Windows 11 64 bit drivers. I’m not even harnessing the graphics card power
Check Event Viewer for entries. I’ve had exactly three “seemingly” random crash/reboots on my Windows 11 system. I only remember two of them, but I learned later that there had to have been an earlier one (maybe I just forgot?). One happened in Cubase and the other in the latest Cakewalk SONAR. When I checked Event Viewer after the Cubase one, I noticed it indicated a “bugcheck” in Event Viewer, but I must not have looked at it thoroughly enough to get more useful details. After the SONAR one, which was on Sunday, I noticed that one indicated there were Minidump files in C:\Windows\Minidump. That is where I found that there was also a third one.
The first one (over a month ago, so pretty early on when using my new system) didn’t give me any clues as to the culprit, but both the one associated with Cubase and the one associated with SONAR pointed to Motufwa64.sys, which must be a driver for my MOTU 828X interface. I think I was doing something in each of those applications at the time that switched sample rates in the interface from what it had been at the time. While doing that doesn’t cause a reboot every time, I suspect there must be some special set of circumstances that added to that scenario that made it happen.
I haven’t had enough time to do a bunch of research on it, only a bit of general searching for the error, including coming across some info on the MOTU site that I didn’t have time to fully absorb at the time.
Anyway, what I’m getting at here is, if you can look at the DMP file that would be produced by this sort of incident in WinDbg, you may be able to get a clue as to the cause. It has to be either a driver problem or a hardware problem – applications can’t directly cause the system to reboot. I never saw this sort of problem on Windows 10, so maybe there is some MOTU driver issue on Windows 11. Alternately, I was running my 828x on Thunderbolt II on Windows 10, whereas that isn’t available on my new system (and Thunderbolt 4 is not backwardly compatible on Windows), so I am using it over USB instead, and maybe there could be something different in that area.
@rickpaul Thank you for sharing. Highly appreciated. I will look into it.