ORIGINAL: Seth Perlstein [Cakewalk]

Hey guys,

Interesting thread and I thought I'd chime in with some personal experience.

I have found that systems, specifically motherboards, that are not designed for Vista will not perform well with Aero or SONAR at low latency. What I mean is motherboards which were designed before Vista was released and XP was standard. So I think if you planto use Vista do it with hardware that was designed to run it.

Also, in regards to Jose's specific Aero issues ... be aware that the higher resolution you run Windows the more GPU memory it will consume. If you have 256megs of RAM on your GPU then I doubt that is enough for two screens at high resolution. I would be curious to see the results of your tests with and without Aero at a low screen resolution, or at the high screen res but with a 512meg or higher video card.

very nice post! and it brings up alot of potential issues.

of those who read my posts you will recall how i was complaining about motherboard bios' being designed with Vista in mind and adding XP support as an after thought or a red headed step child (god i hope susan doesnt have a red headed step child or here we go again)
but just in case Susan thats a joke... i was a foster parent for many years and my daughter is adopted.

anyway, Seth is completely correct. the way that a vista designed bios is programed vs one that was not handles memory allocation completely different.
not only affecting video cards but UADs, and really any PCI, PCIe device.

and could and would play into this discussion.

Scott put his foot in it. That is clear but I don't believe he meant any harm. However after trying to stay out of this I substituted in my mind other words for the offending phrase. It came blazing back to me that if ethnicity or religion had been used instead of woman we, I think, to a MAN, would have jumped on it. This was clearly a very bad choice of word or point. Here I am in no good position. If I am too strong in this it will and rightfully so be looked upon as taking advantage of this situation for my own purpose. This I am not doing. I do think Scott is not a bad guy or mean spirited. It is out of character for him to make such a blunder. A little forgiveness here would go a long way. No one is pure here least of all me. We all think things that we don't say.

sorry but i dont find it a blunder at all "womened up" is EXACTLY what i meant

i was refering to my wife and as such as can say what i feel. this was not a reference to women in general.
and would say it again, but of course i am not know to be politically correct, hope to god i never am.

funny no one said a word about red headed step child (although give it time and someone will)
its a common used reference.
"womened up" is a common used geek speak amoungst computer guys, and can be used for either sex
it means tons of useless programs installed as i listed.

and susan you most certainly did insult, trust me the feeling is mutual.

i was refering to my wife and as such as can say what i feel. this was not a reference to women in general.

Although Im sure you meant no harm by your comment, I and Im sure anyone else reading would take it as a generalization of woman. And then to turnaround and gouge her with the stepchild comment was ignorant and disrespectful.

This has gone on long enough! Please can we all get back to Aero.

How can you wait? You got what you said? I hope it goes well for you. If you have any questions please ask. I like you choice in CPU.

I wouldn't go for the 1 GB type . A test was done on them and they did not perform as well as the 512 MB versions. 512 is all you need. Also none of the 1 GB cards are fan less. This is a consideration if you want low noise. I have a XFX Gforce 8500 GT that is fan less and works well with Vista. It has dual outs but one is a VGA out the other is DVI. I have found it very good for most things. Its not a great game card though unless your games don't need high frame rates. I got it for $60. You can do better if you want but any of the GForce 8500 on up will do the job. The best cost/performance wise is the GForce 8800. You can get must faster cards but you wont see a better Sonar display.

Guys, do we have any concrete proof that turning off Aero actually disables the Avalon-based GPU offloading? To my understanding aero is nothing more than the name for the redesigned user interface that comes with Vista. I have yet to find any article that mentions Avalon and Aero in the same breath, and I'm HIGHLY doubtful that disabling it reroutes the screen write load to the CPU. Avalon is written into the OS. It is there even in Vista platforms that don't support Aero (i.e. Home Edition.) John, your test results, unscientific though they may be, do speak for themselves, and a 15-20% decrease in CPU use is nothing to laugh at... but is it possible there's another explanation? I recall one of the videos around the sonar 6 release where Brandon was talking about the new option for Multimedia Class Scheduling Service (MMC:SS) and if I'm remembering right, he did make mention of graphics offloading (version 6 was the first fully Vista-compatible version of Sonar.) Could that have something to do with it? I'm not trying to play devil's advocate here, I'm genuinely asking what has led you to believe that switching off the 3d-accelerated user interface disables a somewhat unrelated OS-specific feature? Press releases, white paper, anything.

ORIGINAL: Seth Perlstein [Cakewalk]

About MMCSS ... what's cool about MMCSS in Vista is that it enables apps like SONAR to maintain thread priority in Windows even if there is other stuff going on in the background. This means that you can be doing many background tasks in Windows and SONAR will always get the CPU's attention ahead of the other programs which means it is less prone to pops and clicks from interfering applications or services. In SONAR 8 in particular we have tweaked how SONAR works with MMCSS to exploit it to the fullest, which is partly why SONAR 8 performs better at low latency in Vista than past SONAR versions have.

Seth - Is this part of the reason that Noel recommended not to switch priority to background services? Switching priority to background services was a common Vista tweak to make things run faster, but Noel debunked this. If we keep priority to the program, does that help MMCSS?

Seth - Is this part of the reason that Noel recommended not to switch priority to background services? Switching priority to background services was a common Vista tweak to make things run faster, but Noel debunked this. If we keep priority to the program, does that help MMCSS?

I think you mean with XP it was a common practice. Yes Sonar is designed to handle its own threads . It does not want or need priority to be given to background services for say audio streaming to be well controlled and given priority. Sonar will do that on its own. When you set priority to background it means Windows is going to do a lot of say housekeeping stuff at the expense of Sonar. Good point though.

Guys, do we have any concrete proof that turning off Aero actually disables the Avalon-based GPU offloading? To my understanding aero is nothing more than the name for the redesigned user interface that comes with Vista. I have yet to find any article that mentions Avalon and Aero in the same breath, and I'm HIGHLY doubtful that disabling it reroutes the screen write load to the CPU. Avalon is written into the OS. It is there even in Vista platforms that don't support Aero (i.e. Home Edition.) John, your test results, unscientific though they may be, do speak for themselves, and a 15-20% decrease in CPU use is nothing to laugh at... but is it possible there's another explanation? I recall one of the videos around the sonar 6 release where Brandon was talking about the new option for Multimedia Class Scheduling Service (MMC:SS) and if I'm remembering right, he did make mention of graphics offloading (version 6 was the first fully Vista-compatible version of Sonar.) Could that have something to do with it? I'm not trying to play devil's advocate here, I'm genuinely asking what has led you to believe that switching off the 3d-accelerated user interface disables a somewhat unrelated OS-specific feature? Press releases, white paper, anything.

Well simply put you are talking about two different things. Seth answered the main point but let me look at it this way. Screen updates were a function of the the app or of screen things that are are going on. A plugin with a meter is going to need screen updates that have nothing to do with the underlying processing. As you add screen elements to the display the need for constant updating the more they will impact the CPU. For XP CW added the manual cutting of screen updates with pressing the pause key. This helps those projects that have tons of graphics objects from bogging the CPU with constant screen updates. In Vista with Areo all this is moot now. The CPU has nothing to do with screen updates thus it may come that Sonar looks just fine and smooth yet the heavy processing of audio is causing the CPU to choke. You wont see the project go slow or visually stutter but the audio engine will go off. Now the whole point for not using Aero is to allow systems that can't handle the graphics load from Aero from not running at all. The basic Aero desktop by its self is not all that taxing on your graphics card. Nor is it when you have a dynamic wallpaper. What is taxing is a program like Sonar that has tons of random screen updates when we open up lots of child windows. That is VST and DX plugins plus all the other views Sonar has. When you hit play all those things that move are things that have to be sent to something to get them updated. Its either the CPU or the GPU. Aero use the GPU. Turning off Aero puts those updates back to using the CPU. I have noticed that if you run some things it will turn off Aero one is Quicktime. One reason I don't like Apple programed stuff. They use their own means to do things and bypass Windows methods. With Aero this is another way MS has kept compatibility with things that use proprietary ways of doing things.

Hi john , very good thread as usual !!

i never done the tweaks for background services as i never saw any improvement !!
with nowdayz technology , small tweaks like that and visual ones to free up the os ressources is useless .....while i saw with my first try of vista that the dpc latency was going yellow !!! i almost so that the multimedia in general and audio in particular was very well , let's say smooth !!

I think that john is maybe right cause i do think that aero is not only a small visual advantage but a whole chain of visual benefits and optimistation , basically when you desactive it , you kill the visuals + otha stuff ("i think") , those otha stuff are missing ...: have to be valided by ms huyz or some that knows this partocular area .....

but don't you think that the latency and acces to cpu are less heavy in xp than in vista , i gotta dual boot , while on xp i'm on the 50us , i'm yellow on vista  !!!

at the same time yellow on vista made feel like some 300us in xp , just a feeling , nothin mesurable but ...

gonna receive this beast soon  (not enougth soon ! to my taste ;))

http://www.rolandce.com/p...469&language_id=FR

clic on "FICHE" to see the specs ...

(one cool thing is all cakewalk edirol roland and boss devices driver already in , just plug and play ...cool )

will defintly take my time to check , ,but i think win 7 is makin me seriously think about  jumpin specially with the new bitbridge , 64 bits must be something good , Jose finally conviced me , damn !!

Don't count on all Nvidea cards working perfectly either.

I am running Nvidea 8600gt with 1G, the newest drivers. I used to have a 7600 with 256M both cards work fine with dual monitors as long as Aero is off. If Aero is on after a while the display becomes corrupted and will eventually BSOD the computer. It has done this with Vista sp2 x64 and windows 7 x64. I have also replaced the asus p5b board that I used to have with a Gigabyte but still the same issue. I tried different driver versions and always the same result. I gave up trying to get it to work with Aero on and I just leave it off.

I did some searching about this issue and others are reporting the Aero problems with several of the Nvidea cards when they are used with dual displays. 

I was thinking about going with an ATI based card next time