about to take plunge on Sonar...one final question...

I'm sure someone else more technical than I will chime in to be certain, however I believe it is - as I see the load distributed across all 8 cores when running Sonar.  I also vaguely remember reading release notes for past versions indicating improved core load distribution in certain patches, etc. 

Russ

leapinlizard


Yes, Sonar X2 will take advantage of multiple cores.  Several of the techs have been on the forum and stated as much, although I wouldn't know where to find the threads.

Yeah, i was wondering if the Techs get on here. over at Props forum (my primary source of experience), Mattias and other bigwigs regularly weigh in on technical questions; it's very reassuring (as opposed to DP's user forum). Who are the Cakewalk reps on this site?
 
i assume that issues with cores and threads were addressed in X1 since that was the big change. but i was wondering if it was ever confirmed.

Great question - here is an article/interview with one of the Cakewalk folks that addresses that:

http://blog.creationengine.com/?p=304

Bob Bone

robert_e_bone


Great question - here is an article/interview with one of the Cakewalk folks that addresses that:

http://blog.creationengine.com/?p=304

Bob Bone

Well, a lot has changed in both chip tech and Sonar since 2006, but this is good information. Thank you.

You should probably just download the X2 demo and see for yourself. CW has been coding for multiple cores for a pretty long time (I think they first added support in Sonar 3 almost 10 years ago), and they seem to refine it all the time. Sonar's CPU meter supports up to 32 cores.

The problem isn't with SONAR, which uses multithreading quite well, but with plugins. In a heavily-loaded project, 90% or more of the processing time may be spent within plugins. Having a highly-optimized engine doesn't do much good when relatively few of the total CPU cycles are spent there. 

SONAR has to treat each track as a single thread due to the fundamentally sequential nature of the signal chain. It can spawn threads for things like video updates, but the audio signal flow within a given track is necessarily a do-this-then-do-that serial process. Consequently, any one plugin in the track's fx bin can dictate the efficiency with which audio is processed in that track.

Some plugins support multi-threading, but most do not. Of the ones that do, most actually work better single-threaded because what's happening within the plugin is also serial in nature. 

So yes, SONAR is multi-threaded and makes good use of multiple cores and multiple CPUs, but ultimately it's the third-party components that determine overall system load and efficiency.

I think the ThreadSchedulingModel variable in aud.ini still defaults to 1, so you could try setting that to 2 and see if it helps, although I don't know if Noel has made any changes to the code that makes that variable obsolete at this point.