Progress: I started a new project on 88.2khz sample rate and it doesn’t max out the VST Performance. Though, I do get a lot of wild ASIO spikes, but nothing that maxes out the performance. I’m using the beta driver, by the way, which does appear to work better than the official release. Albeit, the ASIO performance is still so high in accordance with the number of effects used.
I think I just may chalk this one up as a loss (sort of) and shouldn’t done even further extensive research than I did. I’m going to work with it some more and see what I can do or maybe someone hopefully has some suggestion that I haven’t tried.
edit: Interestingly, while the ASIO meter is indicating an overload while using 88.2khz as the samplerate, I don’t really get any pop or clicks or otherwise any glitches. Is this normal?
As already suggested USB selective suspend must be disabled
Check your motherboard manufacturer for updated usb drivers
Try different USB ports
If you’re on USB3 try a USB2 port.
88.2k will obviously double the load from 44.1k…surely you werren’t using 88 on ASIO4all??
We also still have no idea what buffers you are trying to run at as the figures you gave before made no sense.
Sorry to hear that you’ve had some problems with your 2i2.
The performance you get using ASIO4ALL is not always a great benchmark to test against. ASIO4ALL is essentially a driver ‘wrapper’ in that it takes WDM (non-ASIO) drivers and makes them appear as ASIO drivers so that they can be used in a DAW. These drivers are typically 16-bit rather than 24-bit.
In your first post you mentioned that you were using an ‘800ms’ buffer setting in ASIO4ALL - if this was indeed the case then this would go a long way to accounting for why the VST Performance meter wasn’t peaking anywhere near as much as when using the Focusrite 2.5.1 driver at a 10ms buffer size.
As you’ve noted, you would appear to be using quite a few CPU-intensive VST plugins which may require you to raise the buffer size to avoid CPU overloads on your machine. You mentioned that you’d had some improvements since going to beta driver 3.2.2 which is great news, you may wish to try a slightly older alternative in driver 3.1.10: http://beta.focusrite.com/file.php?id=1154
Different drivers respond better/worse in different systems since there are a large number of other processes/drivers that are involved in the audio stack and they all need to work well together.
I apologize if I seem off, but this is my first time using an actual real interface outside of the built-in “interface” in my monitors.
The Focusrite USB driver 2.5.1 doesn’t measure it’s buffer in samples, but in milliseconds. Unless I’m already remembering wrong, I had the “buffer setting” set to 10ms. From what I understand, this is against the norm from how other manufacturers do it.
The beta driver actually measures it’s buffers in samples, and right now I’m going between 512 to 1024 depending on the project. This is giving me better performance.
I have disabled the USB selective suspend and have the latest drivers for my USB ports from Gigabyte and I am using USB2.
@ Jack
Thank you for responding. Before I try the older driver, is there any difference between the latest driver and the one you mentioned?
Yes there are differences between the two - the 3.2.2 driver features a change in sample rate switching behaviour, as well as addressing a specific issue regarding Scarlett 18i8 firmware updates. Neither of these things are relevant to the issue you were having and the fact that the 3.1.10 driver has been around a bit longer means that we’re more aware of the performance of this driver versus 3.2.2.
As I mentioned, it’s hard to predict exactly which drivers will work together best in a system but, on Intel-based systems such as yours we would tend to recommend 3.1.10 over 3.2.2 unless you were having issues with a firmware update.
The Focusrite USB driver 2.5.1 doesn’t measure it’s buffer in samples, but in milliseconds. Unless I’m already remembering wrong, I had the “buffer setting” set to 10ms. From what I understand, this is against the norm from how other manufacturers do it.
Ah…OK…And no need to apologise for anything…I was just querying, not reprimanding. Hope it didn’t come across as such!
I was confused as you’d said that it was the maximum latency that was possible and 10ms RTL seems way too low to be a maximum.
At least it sounds like you’re seeing some improvement now. Even if Focusrite don’t have the greatest reputation for driver performance I find it hard to believe they can’t better ASIO4all on your built in audio.
I’m going to work with it some more and see what I can do or maybe someone hopefully has some suggestion that I haven’t tried.