How CPU intensive is Sonar X1?

Hi vaultwit-

Welcome!

I have a less powerful system than yours and was able to run projects with a number of pretty CPU-intensive plugins with no problem, but if you want to see exactly how it will perform on your system you can try the demo, available here.

-Susan

Pretty good.

That said, I did upgrade the stdio main brain from a core2duo to an i7 for X1.

Runs on a Pentium M development laptop w 512 mb ram (now that's ghetto) pretty well.

The thing I'm afraid of is having a full-blown, 20 track project going with real-time reverb, compression, VST's on each track and then dealing with an annoying delay after pressing the play buttom before the mix actually starts playing.

I would hope that, even with a full-blown project like that open, the mix would begin playing immediately when I press the play button, instead of taking 4-6 seconds to "process the effects" before the mix begins to play.

I'm hoping that my Core i5 and 4GB RAM is enough to allow that?

vaulttwit: i load well over 20 tracks and enough processing/verbs
you name it ..no delay or latency 2.9ms i5 is for shure the going deal/build right now ..post your new build/parts list
and I will go over it with you !!

Yeah I'm hoping for just overall speediness and quickness. I remember back on my old comp, I had Adobe Audition running and everything was slow. Playing back the mix had a long delay, dragging around clips was laggy, flipping from waveform view to multitrack view take a good few seconds, and most importantly applying effects took foooorever.

I hope that I have a smooth experience with Sonar X1. I really hope this version of Sonar is in fact very CPU efficient. I would love to be able to drag clips smoothly, experience zero delay for mix playback, etc. I'll get to see on my own when I get around to installing the demo.

Thanks for everyone's input, more input is definitely welcomed and appreciated. And StarTrekh, I'm sorry but I'm not enough of a tech guru to tell you my build/parts list... I just know the bare minimum - processor and RAM. Haha

bluzdog


I'm running an i5 processor with 4 gigs of ram under Windows 7 64 bit. Windows 7 eats up some ram even at idle. I bog down frequently and I'm upgrading to 8 gigs of ram. YMMV.....

Do you mean bog down while in Sonar X1? In what way? Do you have a delay between clicking the play button and actually hearing the playback in your projects?

Guitarhacker

vaultwit


The thing I'm afraid of is having a full-blown, 20 track project going with real-time reverb, compression, VST's on each track and then dealing with an annoying delay after pressing the play buttom before the mix actually starts playing.

I would hope that, even with a full-blown project like that open, the mix would begin playing immediately when I press the play button, instead of taking 4-6 seconds to "process the effects" before the mix begins to play.

I'm hoping that my Core i5 and 4GB RAM is enough to allow that?

have you tried 'freezing" the track...or perhaps bouncing it to audio and archiving the original tracks?

that would let you convert the FX and VST's to audio to get instant playback. You would also retain the original tracks with VST;s and FX in the event you want to edit something. I do this all the time to keep my CPU numbers low. I run the i5 4gb system and it handles that very well.


My OS is XP/32

Yeah, actually I had been doing that for quite some time in the past. I would have one project specifically for converting each midi track to a wav track using VSTs and synths. Then I'll make another project with all those wav's tracked to add effects and actually mix. But I've come across a lot of problems where I would need to change the original sound that the VST/synth had created, requiring me to go back to the previous project and re-render that track. And I just hated having to go back and forth between projects.


One of the big thing's I am hoping for with Sonar X1 is to do everything at once. I want to be able to create a project in Sonar X1, load up the midi, equip them with VSTs/synths, apply real-time effects, properly mix and equilize everything, then when I'm ready, render the entire project to a nice and finalized song.


And I know that will take CPU to do. Do you think my hope in X1 is realistic after all?

fooman


I don't run a crazy machine, I have XP32 with 3 GB RAM, quad-core cpu.
But I think I can say that it depends on what plugs you are using and on how many tracks.
If you have stock reverb on an aux bus, EQ, etc. used on 10 tracks.  Then ya, I do that all the time.  No problem.
 
If you have 60 tracks, all with EQ, compression, 3 reverbs going, multiple delays, stuff on your 2-buss, Melodyne or an intensive plugin of that sort... then you will have to freeze some tracks in order to get to the endzone.

Hmm I see. But it seems like you've listed to two extremes. I think for me, a typical project would be right in between the two extremes you mentioned. Probably 20-30 tracks each with single reverb, single delay, and compression... and maybe like (hypothetical here) three instances of a synth like Rapture or Z3TA+ and 5 instances of DimensionPro.


Note that I'm running Core i5, 4GB RAM.


What do you think? Performance smooth or sluggish?

Hi vaultwit,

Which i5 do you have? Some of the first i5's were only Dual Core.

I'm running an i5 Quad Core 750 w/4GB RAM on a Gigabyte motherboard. Windows 7 64 bit and Sonar Producer 8.5.3 32 & 64 bit and X1 32 & 64 bit.

I run very similar projects to you.

Once I start getting a lot of tracks during the recording stage, I have to freeze tracks because of latency, but once I get done with that, I set my sound card buffers from 128 samples to 1024 samples, unfreeze the tracks, and then do my mixing/mastering. My CPU usage run around 40 ~ 45 percent.

The thing I did that helped my system stability the most was, I put in a second hard drive, and I followed every step in the links of this post ...

http://forum.cakewalk.com/tm.aspx?m=2195242

Another thing that helped me was, I don't use the 64bit version of X1 anymore. The biggest benefit to it is, you can access more RAM, but since you and I are only running 4GB, there's really not much reason to run 64bit unless all of the plugins you are using are 64bit. Some things in X1 are still 32bit only and if you run X1 64bit, then Bitbridge will load automatically in the background and that's just one more thing loading to slow your PC down. You avoid that by running 32bit. Plus, there are some nice DirectX plugins in the Producer version of X1 that are 32bit only and you won't be able to use them in X1 64bit. It's ok to have both 32bit and 64bit X1 loaded at the same time if you really want to get your feet wet with 64bit.

Even when my PC is bogged down I never had a long delay when I hit play. I think that's a problem on it's own.

Good luck.

vaultwit

fooman


I don't run a crazy machine, I have XP32 with 3 GB RAM, quad-core cpu.
But I think I can say that it depends on what plugs you are using and on how many tracks.
If you have stock reverb on an aux bus, EQ, etc. used on 10 tracks.  Then ya, I do that all the time.  No problem.

If you have 60 tracks, all with EQ, compression, 3 reverbs going, multiple delays, stuff on your 2-buss, Melodyne or an intensive plugin of that sort... then you will have to freeze some tracks in order to get to the endzone.

Hmm I see. But it seems like you've listed to two extremes. I think for me, a typical project would be right in between the two extremes you mentioned. Probably 20-30 tracks each with single reverb, single delay, and compression... and maybe like (hypothetical here) three instances of a synth like Rapture or Z3TA+ and 5 instances of DimensionPro.


Note that I'm running Core i5, 4GB RAM.


What do you think? Performance smooth or sluggish?

I'd say that you are gonna be on the edge of needing to freeze tracks.  I freeze tracks constantly.  I often have 50+ tracks in a project.  I've had some where there are 110+.  I often archive stuff I don't use in cases like this.  Anyways, my point is that you will probably be freezing some tracks in your mixes.  Perhaps I'm wrong, but I'd expect to be doing so if I were to mix a song like you described.  If not, then you're on the edge of running out of headroom in your system I'm thinking.  But I'm purely guessing ;)

fooman

vaultwit

fooman


I don't run a crazy machine, I have XP32 with 3 GB RAM, quad-core cpu.
But I think I can say that it depends on what plugs you are using and on how many tracks.
If you have stock reverb on an aux bus, EQ, etc. used on 10 tracks.  Then ya, I do that all the time.  No problem.

If you have 60 tracks, all with EQ, compression, 3 reverbs going, multiple delays, stuff on your 2-buss, Melodyne or an intensive plugin of that sort... then you will have to freeze some tracks in order to get to the endzone.

Hmm I see. But it seems like you've listed to two extremes. I think for me, a typical project would be right in between the two extremes you mentioned. Probably 20-30 tracks each with single reverb, single delay, and compression... and maybe like (hypothetical here) three instances of a synth like Rapture or Z3TA+ and 5 instances of DimensionPro.


Note that I'm running Core i5, 4GB RAM.


What do you think? Performance smooth or sluggish?

I'd say that you are gonna be on the edge of needing to freeze tracks.  I freeze tracks constantly.  I often have 50+ tracks in a project.  I've had some where there are 110+.  I often archive stuff I don't use in cases like this.  Anyways, my point is that you will probably be freezing some tracks in your mixes.  Perhaps I'm wrong, but I'd expect to be doing so if I were to mix a song like you described.  If not, then you're on the edge of running out of headroom in your system I'm thinking.  But I'm purely guessing ;)

I didn't even know what "freeze tracks" meant until now, I just looked it up:
 
"temporary render or bounce of a file is done to a track (or tracks) and then any assigned plug-in's to that track(s) are temporarily disabled... to free the computers processor from the burden of running said plug-in's in real-time while still allowing the user to play the tracks with their audible effects"
 
If you freeze a track(s) in order to free up some of the CPU, can you later unfreeze it to edit and revise it's plug-ins? If so, why would anyone NOT use freeze tracks?! I mean, it's not like you'll he constantly editing your effects for each track every single moment. Heck, I'd freeze every track that I'm not using and only temporarily unfreeze it to make changes to it's plugins... Save CPU power.
 
Am I missing something here? Am I understanding "freeze tracks" correctly??

vaultwit


The thing I'm afraid of is having a full-blown, 20 track project going with real-time reverb, compression, VST's on each track and then dealing with an annoying delay after pressing the play buttom before the mix actually starts playing.

I would hope that, even with a full-blown project like that open, the mix would begin playing immediately when I press the play button, instead of taking 4-6 seconds to "process the effects" before the mix begins to play.

I'm hoping that my Core i5 and 4GB RAM is enough to allow that?

My aging system will smoke your "fully blown project", so I don't think you'll have any worries whatsoever.

If you're running 64 bit, adding more RAM would be my only recommendation.

Hmm takes time to freeze tracks eh... how long are we talking here? Is it matter of couple seconds? Or up to a few minutes?

Also, here are the specs for my computer for anyone who might be interested/curious. I use this laptop stock, havent upgraded any of the specs:
http://www.samsung.com/ca/consumer/office/mobile-computing/performance/NP-R580-JS02CA/index.idx?pagetype=prd_detail&tab=specification

Track freeze never takes minutes for a single track here.It's super fast to unfreeze a track for tweeks. It's a great way to conserve rescources. I just got 8 gigs of Ram for $60 from Microcenter. I'm sure it will make a big improvement.

I may consider upgrading my RAM from 4gb to 8gb if it really makes that big of a difference...

So you're running at 64 bit OS & Sonar yes?