ORIGINAL: Zo

Well Timur , as english is not my birth langage ,

Mine neither!

The improvement for the multimedia use and tools where great but , aske programmers what they think about makin some c++, java , cobol , sql ..(for the banks ...) apps for this environnement !!

Well, this is the Sonar forum and obviously Cakewalk made good use of the improvements.

The fact that integartion is as bad in this os isn't because programmers (who used to make some drivers for xp ) don't know hwo to do it for vista) but more because of parameters that were introduced in the os, and makes the equation messy as hell because of the variables ****ty as hell .....

If in return it makes the OS and applications stable as hell then I feel no pity for the developers having to go the extra mile.

But i don't have to go deep , just ask a regular guyz and he will say to you that he feels better in xp against vista , why , he doens't know but he knows ! ;)

Yeah, he doesn't know it's bad drivers and software implementation that keep him from enjoying the OS. It's just so much easier to blame the OS for not being the same under the hood as the outdated XP with just a shiney new GUI. Some applications were so blatantly badly written for Vista and so obviously untested, too, that it defies any words how much the developers tried to cheat us into buying their stuff.

Sometimes I wish Microsoft would force us all to use new technology and forfeit legacy compatibility like Apple does. You'd have to keep your old hardware and OS if you wanted to use old software applications. And developers would need to properly write new software revisions and test them in order to get them sold for new hardware and OS.

and one constant thing was the dpc latency results with same laptops in vista and xp !!
...
that alone is enough to make you see !!! don't tell me to kill process , cause even with the strict minimum process possible , it was ****ty (of course with all devices that may introduce latencies out of the game !)

DPC latency is a product of device IRQs and thus of device drivers! It's not because of the OS that they happen excessively (unless there is a bug that needs to be fixed for free via a Service Update) and it's not because of processes that they happen (unless some process calls a device driver on a regular basis).

You likely know my "HOWTO: Low DPC latencies (<100 us) on bootcamped Macbooks (Pro)" threads from the RME forum that can also be found here: http://forum.cakewalk.com/tm.asp?m=1601661&mpage=1&key=�

I am getting low latencies on an Nforce4 board, I'm getting low latencies on different laptops. Whenever I encountered DPC related problems it was due to some driver misbehaving (like an USB card-reader on one laptop). The only really Vista related DPC problem I encountered is the ACPI Battery driver by Microsoft that leads to regular DPC spikes every 15 seconds on Vista.

Like this one there are device drivers that perform alot better on XP than on Vista DPC wise, especially NVidia graphic drivers for Geforce 8 (and 9 mobile, 7 based cards run perfectly good DPC wise) based card. But still that's a problem of improperly written drivers and will likely happen on W7 just the same, albeit I have to admit that the drop in Idle DPC spikes for the Broadcom WLAN adapter are very nice and hopefully happen with other devices as well (not NVidia graphic drivers though, I already tried that!).

It doesn't matter in practice wether DPC Latencies are downto 2 us (XP) or 20 us (Vista) as long as they stay well below 1000 us and preferably below 100 us. Is this low enough for you (Vista obviously)?

ORIGINAL: Zo

The problem is the core of the os that doesn't allows as good results as in xp , that's as simple !
Is that make xp a better os : no
Is that make xp a better os for reatime audio and video streaming : yes !

I get your point, but I disagree. As you can see in my screenshot (done on NVidia 7 hardware on an NForce4 board btw) there obviously are driver developers out there who can and do write proper driver with good results for perfect realtime audio and video streaming on Vista (besides that the thread handling is in fact better on Vista than on XP as well). So if some drivers are perfectly good then the others must be badly written.

Maybe Vista doesn't make it easy to write good drivers, but since W7 uses exactly the same driver model I don't see where it changes anything about that particular problem?! The main and maybe only reason why W7 Beta runs so well for many people is that after more than 2 years the driver situation for Vista is vastly improved, W7 benefits from that (and thus looks so "mature" in Beta state already).

""""Maybe Vista doesn't make it easy to write good drivers, but since W7 uses exactly the same driver model I don't see where it changes anything about that particular problem?! The main and maybe only reason why W7 Beta runs so well for many people is that after more than 2 years the driver situation for Vista is vastly improved, W7 benefits from that (and thus looks so "mature" in Beta state already)"""""".


That's correct and why : to go with simple term drivers say hey vista i need to access device "x"
Vista sayz : hold on , gotta finish my coffee !

Drivers sayz windows seven i need to access device "X" , microsoft said to seven (take your coffee at home" and be staright at work , so seven replies to drivers : Let's do it !!

Strange way of thinking , ten times more latency (even if a real good value) doesn' make you think deeper ...

"""""Erm, this is where I have to stress "realistic" again as in "practically relevant"! In practice it simply doesn't make any much of a difference. I've got no idea where people got their DPC fetish from!? It's just an indication meter that helps to find possible culprits. I can show you reproduceable dropouts at perfectly green DPC latencies. """""

Dpc latency is not the holy gral , but in the same system , it give some indications ; in your case , a driver , a cpu request access will have to wait ten time more than in xp : you got some big cpu power , so big calculation speed : so the wait isn't as bad ...but like you said cpu has it's limit ! and this limit is reached ten time faster with vista than in xp !

welcome to the dcp-fetish thread

btw: whats is all this fixation with dcp - really ...in the end its only important to not have spikes that kill audio performance...
i dont give a damn if my daw has 50, 100 or 500 dcp....actually i never was aware of this great importance of it (there is a great other thread about dcp in the forum that might confirm my opinion that dcp is waaaaay overrated in all this discussions)

cheers

DPCs do matter and they do hint to possible culprits. Generally anything below 1000 us aka 1 ms shouldn't be much of a problem, because usually we don't use Audio Latency settings and below that and most MIDI interfaces have an average latency of around 1 ms, too. But for those people who use even lower audio buffers and tighter MIDI demands it's good to have these as low as possible.

But discussing the differences between 20 us and 2 us is moot. It does not keep the CPU ten times as busy, it keeps the DPC queue ten times as long unusable for other periphery to access. CPU load increases the the number of DPCs issued and the real load demands of the corresponding driver/device, not with the lengths of a single DPC waiting for nothing.

As far as I understood that is the whole sense and reason behind the DPC system. It catches IRQ calls and puts them into a queue so that the CPU doesn't get occupied unnecessarily while a device does nothing. Long DPCs (aka latency) usually hint to a driver being badly and inefficiently written, because most of that time is spent doing nothing. Think of this like a keyboard (driver) waiting for a keystroke and keeping the queue occupied for as long as you don't press the key even when nothing is to be done. It's not like "CPU, do this, do that!" but more like "CPU, wait for me, waaaait for meeeee, waaaaaaaaaaait just a little bit looooonger for meeeeeeeee!"

I advice anyone geeky and interested enough in what's going on under the hood of his system to install "Process Explorer" (free Microsoft tool, formerly Sysinternals). It will not only tell you the number of DPC and IRQ calls serviced by the CPU, but also the load produces by that.

ORIGINAL: Timur

ORIGINAL: kp

DPC Latency is much like PCI latency last year, IRQ sharing the year before and so on. It *is* a factor, but it's one that has been picked up on as the factor du jour and hyped to the exclusion of all else, usually by people/magazines who don't have a clue but do have a loyal following.

One has to be as fair as to admit that beside real CPU load culprits DPC Latency aka badly behaving periphery drivers are the single most relevant culprit when it comes to the hardware side of badly performing computers.

The rest is usually a mixure of inefficient Audio and transport drivers (USB, FW) and software implementations (DAW). Ableton Live is a good example for the latter. It's multicore support is only optimized for effect calculation and creates so unbelievably much overhead (100% for playback, 150% with Inputs being enabled) that Live performs really worse for pure Audio playback with multicore being enabled.

actually i am aware of what dcp is about - and since we have so much peripherials in our computers its a inherent part of the system ... btw i wonder why people dont care as much abot cas latency of memory - i get "scared" when i see the actual specs of memory "cl9" ??? hey i want memory with cl3 or 4 ....everybody buys those ddr2 with high frequencies but the paradox og the waitstates is ignored...(btw.. new memory interfaces instead of ddr2 or 3 would be much better than those ddr rams on steroids ....
also i think that we are talking about a very marginal aspect of dawtweaking - i never had dpc issues ever ...and whats wrong with customozing a daw so that you dont run scanner, printer, coffewarer, digicam, wifi, or whatever while working on music...also a lot of people use external usb or firewire drives ( a "no go" for me....except e-sata)
or they use usb or fw audiointerfaces .. so what do you expect from such configurations - you cant blame it all on the os

You cannot get vastly more performance out of a computer that already utilizes most (if not all) of its potential!

I'm wondering:
Do Leopard and Vista, in your opinion, represent the best system utilization of current machines?

To put it another way:
Do you think that there are no necessary, major modifications that can be made to one or the other (or both) of them in order to fully utilize the potential of current machines?

To put it yet another way:
Is your suggestion that my 8-core machine (which runs Leopard, XP and Vista) cannot possibly see vastly improved performance by a new OS (this is a trick question, since 8-core machines currently have at least one very significant, OS-driven achilles... and on the Mac there's actually a second)?
I can currently utilize most (if not all) of its potential on each of the current operating systems? So, no hope for that to be significantly improved?

- zevo

ORIGINAL: groove

ORIGINAL: syrath

With regard to the failure of the RME drivers, try right clicking on the install icon, choose the first option in the list (--- the program installed or ran on a previous operating system), select vista, then try running it that way, I had to do that to get my edirol audio interface working.

Same here, and it appears that Windows 7 is actually examining the .exe to see what steps are required. I think it is just reporting the OS version as Vista to satisfy the driver's version check on startup. The driver seems to work just fine after that.

Does not work for the RME Fireface drivers. But I'm sure RME will come out with an updated driver in due time. Other things have higher priority than supporting a Beta OS.

If you guys don't mind I can report some degree of success after 3 days of beta testing:

System:

SONAR 8.02 Producer
OS 7 Beta 64 bit
Intel Q6600
Ram 2 GBs
Interface Edirol UA101
Video Nvidia Geforce 7600 (256 mb)
MB Gigabyte with p35 chipset and older BIOS to cure DPC problems with that model

Caveat 1: I had never used Vista before this beta OS came out, so I'm starting from scratch so to speak.


I also have an M-Audio 2496, but the 64 bit drivers just flat-out will not install (plus they're still in beta...thanx for nothing M-Audio)


OK, the edirol drivers had to be forced a bit to install, but they did. The bottom line is the lowest latency I can get is under ASIO mode at 6 ms. Anything lower will cause stuttering in playback, no crackles however unless I switch to WDM mode. I also noticed that the DPC Latency Checker reported some serious spikes when my latency was below 6ms in ASIO, but was smooth as can be when at 6ms or higher. I had SONAR running at 16bit 44.1 for these tests. I did as has been reported under 64 bit see a reduction in CPU load which is quite nice.

Essentially at 6ms, the system is pretty rock solid with about 10 soft synths running and all the eye candy of the GUI still enabled. I have not been able to load any major projects as of yet owing to the fact that a lot of my 3rd party plug-ins (Waves, Amplitube, NI etc) require authorization and I don't want to do that with a beta OS.

That's the good news. The same setup under XP 32 will allow me to get as low as 2.2ms of latency. With soft synths the difference is not that great, but with input monitoring it is a bit of a problem. Now as I said above I'm new to this whole VISTA/W7 thing, so it could be just a case of sub-par drivers. The issues in W7 with low latency also only occurred when zooming or resizing tracks, so there could also be a conflict of sorts with my graphics card. At this point I don't know, I'm just bummed about the 2496 not working. Makes me want to go to Guitar Center and get an Echo card (Hey you get 30 days with it...why not).

Didn't mean to hijack the thread, just wanted to post some results.

Original: Timur

Sometimes I wish Microsoft would force us all to use new technology and forfeit legacy compatibility like Apple does. You'd have to keep your old hardware and OS if you wanted to use old software applications. And developers would need to properly write new software revisions and test them in order to get them sold for new hardware and OS.

IMO it's to sell as much of the new OS as fast as possible. I don't think it's just to be nice.

But yeah, I would agree with you.

For reasons unknown "Windows Installer" became unuseable on my quite fresh W7 64-bit installation today. That means I cannot neither install nor uninstall things.

The last thing I installed today was Nero 7. After that I encoded a DVD via Nero Vision which made the computer BLUE SCREEN right in the middle of the calculations.

Later I ran Prime 95 to test stability and after more than half an hour the computer hang. Screen was black, power-draw/wattage was down to Idle eventhough it should have been at least double as high because of the maximum CPU load.

After that the Windows Installer must have become corrupted.

Windows Explorer also keeps crashing quite often when I'm trying to do configuration or installation work.

After several BLUE SCREENS, Explorer crashings and now this I am not half as much convinced that the BETA is as stable as people keep calling it.

ORIGINAL: deswind

Assuming that the amount of ram is not an issue, will it be any practical benefit over Windows XP?

Yes, under the hood Vista/Windows 7 is a better OS than XP. Also the tools coming with Vista/W7 that help you to analyse and optimize your system are better and more complete.

Sonar users benefit from its good Vista implementation that make it easier to setup a good performing system without having to ask an IT professional (Audio professionals relying on their systems should always get advise from an IT pro).

It wont change Sonar (or any other DAW for you), it wont get 110% out of your CPU, but it will make it easier to get 100% once proper drivers and software are installed. And especially the W7 GUI is really more efficient.

Last but not least: RAM is always an issue!

ORIGINAL: deswind

I appreciate your response. Additional question - If the key drivers work well in Vista, is it likely that they will work well with W7 or do all the manufacturers need to go back to work on new W7 drivers?

The driver model didn't change, so they should work well in W7 once they work in Vista. Seems to work that way with my gear at least.

So this is when third-party manufacturers should finally get their act together and publish properly written Vista/W7 drivers. XP is over and out.