pinguinotuerto
If it turns out to be a 32 bit plugin. That is still not good news for me and Platinum. If it works fine in X3e, one would expect it to work just as well (or even better) in Platinum. I will report back once I test it. Thank you both.
Geek Alert! I have no idea if this even relates to the topic, but I was curious about how Sonar and Windows allocate CPU cores. How this may relate to plugins is still a mystery to me. But I'm willing to learn :-)
I realize that you are still on Windows 7.
Windows 7:
http://blog.cakewalk.com/how-windows-7-will-effect-your-music-production/ Scalability and Distribution of WorkloadsIn Vista and earlier, on a highly multi threaded system (e.g. SONAR running on an 8 core hyper-threaded Intel Core I7 PC), you have many threads all processing tiny audio buffers at low latency. All these threads are ultimately waiting on the dispatcher lock when it comes time for them to be managed by the Windows scheduler. This global lock becomes a bottleneck in the system and prevents efficient multi-core workload distribution and scalability. This problem gets magnified as you increase the number of cores since they are all gated by a common lock. In Win 7 the kernel team changed the logic in the Windows scheduler to abolish this global dispatcher lock and use per object locks. This effectively removes this age old bottleneck and allows Win 7 to scale better even under workloads of 256 processors.
This change means a lot to applications like SONAR that rely on multithreaded processing of very small workloads. Initial benchmark results have been promising in this regard. SONAR performs more efficiently at low latency on multi core machines.
Power-Saving ProcessingWindows 7 has a new feature called Core Parking. Core Parking is a power saving optimization that shifts processing load to one or more cores and puts other less busy cores to “sleep”. The objective is to let other cores idle if workload levels allow for it. This optimization had us scratching our heads when we ran a benchmark test on a Quad Core I7 machine. At any point in time we would notice that some cores were idle in task manager. The reason for this turned out to be Core Parking. Core parking can be useful to save battery life while running projects on laptops.
Windows 8:
Here is some info on
Windows 8 and Sonar:http://blog.cakewalk.com/windows-8-a-benchmark-for-music-production-applications/ Benchmark: SONAR X1 performance in Windows 8 vs Windows 7
SONAR CPU load at low latency
SONAR CPU gains were observed when using Windows 8 for Low latency performance tests. These gains mean you can run bigger loads in Win8 at low latency without audio glitching.
low latency plugins… 15.5% CPU reduction
input monitoring… 8% CPU reduction
high track count… 23% CPU reduction
High bandwidth audio …6.2% CPU reduction
SONAR multi-core CPU load balancing at low latency
Workloads for cores are more evenly balanced at low latencies on Windows 8. Better balanced core workloads translate to more efficient use of multiple CPU core hardware and thereby better workload scaling for large projects.
low latency plugins… 23% improvement
input monitoring… 31.7% improvement
high track count… 30.6% improvement
High bandwidth audio …17.5% improvement
Memory usage
A 7.9% reduction in memory use under Win8 was observed when loading a large real world SONAR project (Cori Yarkin project from SONAR sample content) under identical system configuration. Reduced memory load can be observed in most of the tests.
Disk Performance
A 78% improvement under Win8 was observed in disk read/write performance while reading large buffer sizes. Improvements were more moderate at smaller buffer sizes.
Windows 10:
Also ran across this article at Cakewalk Blog about
Windows 10 enhancements for music and a few lines jumped out at me...
http://blog.cakewalk.com/...s-10-music-production/AUDIO CORE ISOLATION
Drivers and applications can “opt in” to isolate and dedicate low latency audio processing to a single CPU core, which can minimize the effect of DPC latency spiking from networking, Bluetooth, or other DPC spiking processes by preventing interruptions to audio processing. Behind the scenes this is done using interrupt steering and thread affinity. This is an opt-in feature at the WASAPI level where an app has to identify the threads that need to belong to this isolated core.
This feature looks promising, particularly because Microsoft says they’re looking to expand this to multi-core scenarios that relate to DAWs like SONAR.