KVR Audio

Kraznet · Post by **Kraznet** » Sun Aug 24, 2014 5:50 pm

Yes ALL ST FX are enabled. Playing back a similar 16 midi track project in Samplitude Pro X uses 70% during playback and around 60% idle.
These are multi-out projects. S1 idles between 50-60% but I haven't created a 16 track midi project to test yet.

Kraznet · Post by **Kraznet** » Sun Aug 24, 2014 6:16 pm

OK I made a quick 16 midi track project in S1 all ST3 all FX enabled. CPU fluctuates between 60-70% during playback.

blizzard · Post by **blizzard** » Sun Aug 24, 2014 7:03 pm

Go to Options -> Audio Setup and disable Multi-Processing and see if that helps to lower the CPU usage.

ObiWonder · Post by **ObiWonder** » Sun Aug 24, 2014 8:23 pm

kbaccki wrote:Reaper does "anticipative FX processing" amongst other things to pre-buffer audio processed through FX chains. This pre-buffering decreases CPU load dramatically, but is not useful for live streams, obviously. As such, I believe reaper automatically turns off anticipative FX for any track being monitored live, so that you get the... er... live processing of the FX. I'm sure it also optimizes FX bin processing in general -- even if a track is being monitored live, if you're just idle then there's nothing to process, right? So reaper can quietly ignore ST3 plugin if it knows it's not feeding it MIDI. Other DAWs may take a more brute force approach -- i.e., just give everything in the audio graph a CPU time slice, whether or not any audio/MIDI is being fed through the graph. That would explain the huge disparity.

Try this: go into reaper options and disable anticipative FX. Is there a difference at idle? If it's the same CPU, then it must be something else, like not giving CPU to FX that are not doing anything.

Reaper contains lots and lots of options for optimizing engine I/O, threads, buffering, etc. They spent a lot of time in that area compared to some other daw vendors, IMO.

EDIT: I'd pop the ST3 demo into reaper myself... but, well, you know the deal...

Soon....

Kraznet · Post by **Kraznet** » Mon Aug 25, 2014 10:49 am

blizzard wrote:Go to Options -> Audio Setup and disable Multi-Processing and see if that helps to lower the CPU usage.

Turning off multi-processing makes no difference.

izonin · Post by **izonin** » Mon Aug 25, 2014 9:42 pm

Have you checked the actual CPU load in the task manager. Reaper shows CPU usage differently than other DAWs. For example, on my system, 10% in Reaper equals 40% in Ableton.

Kraznet · Post by **Kraznet** » Mon Aug 25, 2014 9:58 pm

izonin wrote:Have you checked the actual CPU load in the task manager. Reaper shows CPU usage differently than other DAWs. For example, on my system, 10% in Reaper equals 40% in Ableton.

Thanks I will have to try that.

Kraznet · Post by **Kraznet** » Mon Aug 25, 2014 10:07 pm

OK so the task manager is showing between 12%-14% during playback. So it's a bit worse but still better.

izonin · Post by **izonin** » Tue Aug 26, 2014 12:03 pm

What does the task manager show when you run Sampletank in Samplitude and Studio One? I know that Reaper has the best engine. In my experience it's usually about 10-20% better than other DAWs.

fluffy_little_something · Tue Aug 26, 2014 2:01 pm

Since my computer is not the latest model, maybe I should switch to Reaper after all if it is so efficient

I tried it before, but it seemed less intuitive than other DAW's, too complex

Have you tried it in Mulab? It is a tiny DAW (18MB if I remember correctly) and there is nothing to install. Just wondering...

Kraznet · Post by **Kraznet** » Tue Aug 26, 2014 2:48 pm

izonin wrote:What does the task manager show when you run Sampletank in Samplitude and Studio One? I know that Reaper has the best engine. In my experience it's usually about 10-20% better than other DAWs.

Hmm thats interesting.
Samplitude is showing 20% in the task manager vs 66% on the Samp DSP meter.
Studio One is showing 11% in the Task manager vs 79% (fluctuating) in the S1 performance monitor.

Although in Samplitude it seems to vary depending on the amount of CPU cores I make active.If I set it to 2 or I'm getting 20% in the task manager and around 50% in Samp DSP meter. But if I set it to 8 cores, the DSP manager and the task manager are both around 60%. So the more cores I enable the higher the CPU.

Although this does seem to be a SampleTank specific issue. I created a similar 16 midi part project using Kontakt 5 with built-in effects and CPU usage (4 cores enabled ) is 12% in Windows Task Manager and 12% Samp DSP Meter. Also, it's worth noting that SampleTank doesn't have any settings for utilising CPU cores, whereas Kontakt does. In the Kontakt project I'm utilising 2 cores in Kontakt. So maybe that's the reason for lower CPU usage.

EvilDragon · Post by **EvilDragon** » Tue Aug 26, 2014 2:56 pm

izonin wrote:Have you checked the actual CPU load in the task manager. Reaper shows CPU usage differently than other DAWs. For example, on my system, 10% in Reaper equals 40% in Ableton.

Actually Ableton is a bit wrong in this regard... It doesn't show actual CPU usage at all. https://www.ableton.com/en/articles/why ... y-monitor/

I reckon similar case might be with Samp and some other DAWs too.

kbaccki · Post by **kbaccki** » Tue Aug 26, 2014 3:41 pm

Always cross check w/ windows task manager (which itself isn't necessarily 100% accurate)... Or Activity Monitor on OSX (or "top" command line).. Every daw does there own computes differently.

ndugu · Post by **ndugu** » Tue Sep 16, 2014 11:22 am

I've been in touch with the support and they are trying to fix this cpu problem, hope it will be released with the next upgrade!

Sampletank 3.01 CPU usage with 16 instruments loaded - Samplitude vs Studio One vs Reaper