gswitz
Sorry, sounds like I grabbed the wrong link by what your saying. Oops. I meant to grab the link where grab talked about disabling unused audio devices in the device manager and somewhere else I forgot about already. Hold on... searching for the one I meant to post.
Yeah... I can't find it. I didn't mean to post the link about the C++ runtime.
It's
this one. I had already referenced it in another 200 bpm thread. I doubt he tried it, but it made a
huge difference with my AMD HD graphics card and drivers. Ditto making sure it
always has the latest drivers, but more importantly,
knowing how to roll back to previous driver versions when you find the new driver that gives 2 frames per second better performance with the game "Let's Kill Everybody" also kills the performance for audio streaming. Well, at least until the next driver update, in three weeks. Which might render something else unusable.
Others have reported equally huge differences by eliminating a card's HD audio driver; some have reported no detectable difference. So this technique is not guaranteed, but it's free, reversible, takes two minutes to check out, and if it reduces your latency so much the better.
It has taken me years of bashing on this, and buying/rejecting several graphics cards, but at least some people realize I'm not kidding when I emphasize how much graphics performance affects DAWs.
But - we have another potentially valuable clue.
A "fast gaming graphics card" can be one of the absolute worst choices for a computer that needs to stream multiple channels of audio in real time. Some of their drivers will literally
block the CPU from doing anything until the card gets what it wants. Some nVidia cards are known to do this. I found the AMD HD audio driver to be a total pig and completely unnecessary. Starting a couple months ago (come to think of it, around the time of a driver update) I had become so frustrated with SONAR's latency/crashing issues on my desktop I was debating whether to use SONAR only on my less powerful laptop, where it nonetheless worked fine. Deleting that
one driver meant I could keep the fanless graphics card and continue to use SONAR on my desktop, with better performance than I'd ever experienced before. (FYI AMD's Catalyst Control Center program usually crashes within 15 minutes of booting my computer, but that's a good thing because it seems to perform no useful function other than ask for CPU cycles.)
I seem to recall something about SONAR being more graphics-intensive than some other programs, so it's more dependent on system graphics performance.
To add insult to injury, those who purchased PCI-based interfaces to get that extra ounce of performance compared to USB or FireWire and who use PCI-based graphics cards are at the mercy of drivers that hog the PCI bus, and tell the PCI audio card to just
sit there and shut up while it takes over the bus for as long as it wants.
I can't help but think of this analogy for at least some of the problems 200 bpm describes. He's lost his keys, and he's sure he's lost them in the kitchen. So he keeps looking in the kitchen. Someone says "Hey, maybe they're in the living room" but he's sure he lost them in the kitchen, so he keeps looking there. Finally, after hours of frustration he gives up on finding the keys, goes into the living room to watch some TV, and...finds the keys fell in between pillows on the couch.
The only way I know of to get around Windows variability is to get something like a PC Audio Labs, Studio Cat, ADK, or other Windows computer integrated for music. Or you can get a Mac, although unfortunately that experience sure isn't what it used to be. Logic is probably more similar to SONAR than most other DAWs, even though it lacks several key SONAR features.