Performance in Win7 x64 vs. OSX

[jksuperstar]

I've been running SparkLE 1.6 - 1.7.2b on my windows machine for the past two months.  It consumes almost an entire CPU, often glitches the audio (unless I relax my audio buffers from 1ms out to 10ms) (I have a PCIe audio system that can handle 64 channels of audio at 3ms easily).  The GUI, with all of it's crap sliding animation, is also very glitchy, slow response, and even leads to the MIDI comm with the controller getting out of sync.  I'm only using the master audio, so nothing fancy breaking out all 32 channels.  This is true whether I use VST or stand-alone mode.  I have no issues with other programs, like Ableton Live9, the Arturia MiniMg, and all of my Sonic-Core system.

I put it on OSX yesterday, and the processor hit was WAY lower, with no glitches in audio, and that damn sliding graphics interface junk was even a bit smoother.  No issues with the controller getting out of sync with the GUI.  I need this type of performance on the PC before I use this thing on stage.

What gives?  My PC is at least 4x the power of the OSX machine.  I can get much larger projects loaded (and running at 32 sample buffers with 24 ASIO outputs to an external mixer) in Ableton on the PC vs. the MAC, so please, don't cry me the OSX is better song.

This screams of bad cross-compiling or testing.  Arturia, can you look into this?

[jksuperstar]

In digging into this more, an update from Microsoft did the trick.

I don't update the OS very often when I have a working setup.  In this case, the latest is now the greatest.

[Terrym]

Hi cpu is high due to your buffer being so low this makes the asio driver pull more cpu ,and yes sparkle is a bigger program than Mgv, you only need low buffer setting when recording  and into your daw .
ps i use 512 samples buffer setting when mixing or arranging only lower when recording from my sound card inputs.
regards

terry

[jksuperstar]

I'm using a mix of DSP based effects mixed with Native effects for live use.  Hence the desire for low latency.  I agree, mixing can be done much lower, but playing through effects with 20ms total round trip can be a bit annoying.

[jksuperstar]

Even more info...Sorry to think this was an Arturia issue.  My Lenovo W520 had a power stepping issue: even though it is disabled (along with Hyperthreading) in BIOS, I found my CPUs wouldn't run much faster than 800MHz.

To find this, I ran dplat.exe and latencymon.  My latency for IRQs was typically 200usec, which is all good for realtime low-latency audio.  But latencymon showed a few tasks taking 1ms on occasion.  I then used CPU-Z to check my system frequencies, and that's when I found out the CPU was limited to 800MHz.  Seems to be a common problem on this laptop.  I got a power profile from Presonus (just something they offer, really has nothing to do with presonus products).
http://support.presonus.com/entries/203607-Studio-One-Optimizing-Windows-Vista-7-Power-Settings-for-Studio-One
That helped disable the last of the power management crap in windows/lenovo's schemes.  dplat now reports less than 50usec latency consistently.

Alacrity is another tool I use to turn off all the background tasks I don't need while making music.  Networking protocols, bluetooth, printer and scanner crap...all get shut down.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/alacritypc/

I can now run SparkLE at 1.5ms latency.  This makes the MIDI interface MUCH snappier, and the pads far more responsive.  Hope this helps someone else out there...