Hi guys, I am just wondering if Dorico would allow Unify from Plugin Guru to access all 12 cores of my processor. I have 64Gig ram, Windows 11, Intel i7 8700 3.2GHz and 2TB SSDs. I notice that drawing velocity curves in Play mode is slow in real time. Also, inputting notes can be slow. My project is 78 minutes long and involves complicated counterpoint for much of the time. Thanks in advance for your speedy reply. Peter B.
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Hey Peter,
Well, itâs not what you want to hear probably, but if you continue wanting to run large-ish projects such as this one, you could think about upgrading your machine.
But back to the original question, I donât think that will help, since a lot of processing in individual VSTi is already multi-threaded, and besides, I donât think your sluggish Dorico experience has to do with your VST setupâŚ
Benji
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This assumes that Dorico is currently ânot allowingâ that, in some way. Plenty of processes only use a few cores â and not 100% of those cores either â just because they can only be split into so many threads, and those threads may need to wait for other things to happen.
Hyperthreading gives up to 30% better performance compared to a 6-core CPU without. You havenât really got 12 cores â thatâs just Intel Marketingâ˘.
Itâs true that large projects can be demanding on CPU, and slow down. Complex Expression maps and VST plug-ins are also a factor. As Benji says, your CPU is 8 years old.
There are quite a few threads (!) here about performance and hardware.
I do no know a lo about Unify but would this be more suitable used in a DAW? Dorico is primarily for notation and engraving, not music production like you are describing. Consequently, due to fundamental properties of music engraving the rules thereof, all music engraving programs are single threaded by design and technical necessity, as engine layout code cant find ways to parallelize the work required. There are many topics about this on the forum. Do some searches for threading. It has been discussed a lot that having a lot of processing cores does not speed up layout very much at all. Therefore you need to be look at the highest single threaded performance CPU you can get - and even then the performance you desire may not happen. And worse, all the high power CPUâs now focus in mutlithreading, for obvious reasons, and it is hard to find super high performance in single threading, as the market is completely dominated by gaming. So what would be wrong with Cubase for your work? And after all, it now has the Dorico music layout engine?
Exactly as I said! Itâs forum protocol to search before posting, which is only reasonable, and donât forget you are not the first to have this sort of query.
[And by the way, in Discourse the terminology is âtopicsâ not âthreadsâ (but youâll never get people to stop calling them threads.]
Thatâs not entirely accurate. On my computer, Dorico is currently using 45 threads (the Audio Engine is using 79).
There are limits on how much of Doricoâs processing can be spread across multiple cores, because some tasks are linear in nature. But the whole thing is not one massive monolithic unit.
What tool do you use to examine that? Windows or Mac?
Activity Monitor on Mac. But I dare say thereâs a similar tool that comes with Windows.
I see this on the website for Unify:
Requires Windows 7 â Latest OS or Mac OS X 10.13 â Latest OS (Mac Binaries are universal for both Intel and Apple processor support). Unify 1.9.1 for Mac is still available for download for those on older Mac computers (Mac OS 9 â 12).
Since Windows 7 went EOL so long ago that I cannot remember, isnât this software rather out of date? Is it a good current choice?
Thanks for your speedy reply Andro. I appreciate it. Looks like a fast single threaded chip is the way to go. My piece is in 3 sections. If I am working only on one at a time, would it help to make 3 flows and only that flow would be adjusted and therefore be quicker? Cheers for your help and Ben Wiggyâs too. Peter.