Win 7 or Win 8 for multi-core Sonar X3?

The forum cut out my link:
 

 
try again

Nope the link was removed
google this and it should be the first hit
 
Windows 8 - A benchmark for music production applications
 
Michael
 
 

I believe the Cakewalk team have done some considerable testing on Win8 and have passed Sonar to run on this operating system without any major problems. I'm sure if Sonar was taking the kind of performance hits you are mentioning, it would never have passed testing.
My thoughts on this are that there may be some kind of driver issue with the hardware that is being used to test on, I'll be interested to see if this is case, and whether the site you are referring to has given details on exactly what hardware, and drivers, they are using..
 
I think you must have a certain amount of posts on this forum before you are allowed to post links, so they are not showing up and I can't find the articles you are referring to.

Running 8.1 x64  here in my studio. No OS related issues. I boot straight into the desktop.

I was running X1 on a quad core 6600 on Vista up until four months ago.  That machine was over 5 years old.  When I decided it was time for a new PC I contracted a local business (who also happens to be a musical client) to build it.  I chose Windows 8.1 for the touch-screen capability (even though I haven't moved to that technology yet.)  The PC is an Intel i7 4770K 3.5 gHZ processor with 16 Gig of RAM.  It's a beast to say the least!  I also have a Samsung solid state drive for the boot/program drive.  I'm very satisfied with this system as a whole!  It takes 30 seconds or less to fully boot, no issues with X3D, I see 8 processors in Sonar and I've been throwing a boatload of plugins that I wouldn't have dreamed of throwing on the Vista machine and I've not had any issues. 

You also can add this $4.99 program to Win 8 to add the menu tree in desktop mode.  They also have another cheap program to resize the Metro tiles to run on the desktop.  They are rock solid.
 
http://www.stardock.com/products/start8/
 
 

FCCfirstclass
You also can add this $4.99 program to Win 8 to add the menu tree in desktop mode.  They also have another cheap program to resize the Metro tiles to run on the desktop.  They are rock solid.
 
http://www.stardock.com/products/start8/ 

You don't need this with 8.1, you can now get your start button back, which will bring up the ModernUI screen, here you can put on shortcuts to all of you apps... it works well... In a lot of cases this functionality is hidden by default and needs to be enabled.

Sid, so do you have X3 on both? Or does just the newer one have it?

apples/oranges Toshiba i7 vs asus i5/hp i5
 
Would really LOVE TO HEAR some real world experience on the OPs main question:
 

jtbarr
 
Here's the issues I would like some QUANTITATIVE data on:
 
Assuming 64 bit versions of both.
 
1.  Is the multi-core scheduling any better under Win 8?  (vs Win 7 with latest Service pack)
 
2.  Is the system timing any more accurate with Win 8?  I heard there are MIDI jitter problems in Win 7.  I haven't measured it, but is it MIDI only or is audio affected?  I have noticed latency problems in my system with Sonar 7 and X1 (I now am using X3), but usually these latencies were ASIO related or other system problems.
 
 

 
I have had win 8 for a long time and haven't installed it.  Now have moved to a i7 4930 6 core/12 thread sweetheart of a cpu and still notice periodic redlining of core/thread #1 on complex creations while load is light across the board... Throwing way more at it than at my old i7 950, but still would love to see a better distribution...given ooooodles of stuff is going on that could be spun off to the other 11 threads I would think (me not necessarily a braniac)
 
THAT IS THE MAIN ISSUE, to little old me...
seems easy to quantify but...nadda yet.

I can say as far as the OP that I am getting a higher count of plugins without clicks and pops with 8.1 than I ever do with Windows 7 and X3. Also, I have not done any tweaking to the settings in either of these computers. Some forums say do it, some say don't. I just never got around to it. Anyone in here using 8.1 that has improved performance with any tweaks?
 

mmorgan
With regard to the multicore scheduling: I've read, and don't totally understand, that Sonar can take advantage of multicores, and VST instruments can take advantage of mulitcore scheduling in stand alone mode, but VST instruments cannot take advantage of multicore scheduling when they are running in a host such as Sonar (or any other DAW). So it is possible that the heavy usage you may see on the first core is your VSTs gobbling up the first core.

I read those NI threads.  There is a lot of misunderstanding on those threads.  A task doesn't "own" a core per se.  The OS dynamically assigns work to available cores to the greatest extent possible.  The only issue I have seen here is that a SINGLE VST cannot run simultaneously on several cores.  But I believe SONAR puts each VST into its own thread and therefore the OS can put those threads anywhere there is processing available.
 
This has always been a touchy area of OS scheduler design.  Most software people don't understand how important CPU affinity is.  Today's fast processing speeds are only achievable when you keep the CPU pipeline full, and Intel (and other others) have achieved that by designing elaborate hierarchical memory systems to cache instructions  and data flowing into the processing pipeline.  If some software goof causes a task to jump to another core or another CPU, that may seriously interrupt the pipeline.  That can drop performance by 25% or more.  Recent versions of Windows (and presumably Linux and Mac too) tweak the dispatchers to try to keep as much CPU affinity as possible.  That could account for one core running significantly higher than the others.  But that is a good thing, not a bad thing.
 
If this is happening over a sustained period of time, then there is most likely one process that is carrying a huge load.  You can identify that by launching task manager, then clicking on the Resource Monitor button.  Within the resource monitor CPU section, sort processes by CPU usage and the offender should be obvious.

Vastman
 5 of my 6 cores are at 10/20 % while core 1 is way up there.  Seems Diva would just be put on a different core, for each instance but that definitely isn't happening as I've tried running just Diva, 2 Divas, then 3 etc... and not much migrates to the other cores.  

I haven't seen anything that extreme.  Sometimes the CPU numbers can be inflated if multi-process software does what used to be called "spin loops", which is a crude way of doing the interlocks that are necessary for multiple threads to collaborate.  I wouldn't think that would be too common these days, but it might be a possibility.  In such a case, the extra CPU shown under the main core isn't really productive time and would more accurately be shown as waiting.
 
A variation on the spin loop thing is that sometimes when monitoring hardware, you can't depend on receiving interrupts when key events happen.  In those cases, the software may have to frequently (tens or hundreds of times a second) make inquiries against the hardware to determine is something important has happened.  I have no reason to believe that is a big factor in this case.
 
I doubt that is the problem.  It just seems like the main process has more to do than the others.  Things like VSTs naturally end up on their own threads and are therefore eligible to be dispatched on other cores.  But some things aren't as easy to "parallelize" so the effectively end up under the main thread.  Can you identify the process that is taking up the most CPU when this happens?