What graphics cards are you using - that don't sound like a vacuum cleaner in the daw?

Have a simple Nvidia GeForce 210, with no fans, just a huge cooler taking an extra slot space.
But silent then of course.
 
Thinking if there are any benefits to move up in performance?
 
Are there noticable differences between cards, not doing computer gaming?
But also concerned that noisy fans are not that nice.
 
I run one monitor currently, but might get another one.
Is it more of a concern with better card doing two monitors?
 
Thanks.

I run two 27" Monitors on my 512 meg 210 no problem.
 
Not sure that Cake employs any spare GPU processing power offloading for Audio. 

Wookiee
Not sure that Cake employs any spare GPU processing power offloading for Audio. 

That is something I would love to know! If it doesn't happen it should! Maybe the OS does it automatically...

Doktor Avalanche

Wookiee
Not sure that Cake employs any spare GPU processing power offloading for Audio. 

That is something I would love to know! If it doesn't happen it should! Maybe the OS does it automatically...

As far as I know the application has to be written for purpose and the Graphics card has to support such access, there was quite some noise made about it a couple of years ago shame if it is not exploited more.

Doktor Avalanche
Not sure that Cake employs any spare GPU processing power offloading for Audio. 

Wookiee
That is something I would love to know! If it doesn't happen it should! Maybe the OS does it automatically...

 

Wookiee
 As far as I know the application has to be written for purpose and the Graphics card has to support such access, there was quite some noise made about it a couple of years ago shame if it is not exploited more.

The only people who would really know this are the bakers (we don't have access to the code). I'm sure there are plenty of graphical optimizations that haven't happened though looking at the responsiveness of the UI in certain scenarios.

Thanks again for all input.
 
And windows settings - thinking performance vs visual features?
1920x1080 and 32bit colorspace?

 
I think I just turned off transparent stuff, which only annoys me anyway - the rest as default.
This is an extra load as I recall - making underlying windows also repaint all the time.

Really, it's mostly 3D stuff and video transcoding that taxes a card. General application display is negligible and has been for years. Translucency FX might count but you'd not actually use those WHILE recording or editing. And you mentioned turning them off anyway. Nevertheless, CPU and GPU power have very little interaction within Sonar.

ViRiX Dreamcore
I'm using an NVIDIA GTX 560 Ti and you don't really get much noise from it. My mic is also somewhat far from the computer though. Also helps if you have a cardioid mic so that it won't pic up stuff in the background. 

Thanks for suggestions I'll look into it.

Sanderxpander
Really, it's mostly 3D stuff and video transcoding that taxes a card. General application display is negligible and has been for years. Translucency FX might count but you'd not actually use those WHILE recording or editing. And you mentioned turning them off anyway. Nevertheless, CPU and GPU power have very little interaction within Sonar.

You may be right about that.
It's just when I ran Sonar 4 on XP many years ago - just opening a popup menu created pops in audio.
Turning off, if it was shadow on popup menues - it went away.
So acceleration stuff mattered at the time - and such things were included in PC optmizations for audio.
But that was 10 years ago.
 
I haven't had this gui issue for a while. Looking if online being partial reason for something interfering, went through windows updates=off, Acrobat=off, Flash=off.
I know my current router/4G modem send some stuff in intervals - will see if I can turn things off like UPnP, ICSM messages(or what they were called).
 
So it could be some other interference outside Sonar that do stuff - that made me look for graphics update of card.

SilkTone
My new DAW from StudioCat uses a GTX-960 and it is very quiet. But as others have pointed out, using a DAW will typically require very little from the GPU so I will be surprised if any semi-recent graphics card will need to spin up its fan.
 
It's been a while since I did 3D stuff, but IIRC, even 2D drawing these days are handled by the 3D rendering hardware. IOW, the OS will pass along a 2D surface as 2 polygons creating one rectangle. Remember, GPUs are designed to handle a gazillion polygons at the same time, so 2 polygons are a walk in the park.

Seems like a hotshot card that one, but will look at it.
I don't remember right now if Sonar got it, but remember I preferred in Cubase to have now bar in middle and let entire screen scroll all the time. Maybe that put some more load on GPU, don't know. It would be lot's of pixels to move all the time as audio is running.
 
I get a feeling I just scratched the surface in Sonar Artist yet. But will look for such features of scrolling track view - not so fond of current switching page - prefer if staying on right side and scroll so eyes can follow as it goes, and not break my neck turning left.

A plugin can certainly cause Sonar to glitch if has inefficient UI rendering. When I got v1.0 of PSP Lotary, it's screen updating was so CPU intensive that it caused all UI updating from Sonar etc to become sluggish, and resulted in dropouts, clicks etc. It has these animated bars to show how the speakers are spinning, and I don't know what they did but it caused issues. Once you close its UI, things went back to normal.
 
I'm on my new system now, and no longer experience those issues. But I installed Lotary v1.0.1 on my new system, so I'm not sure if its just because the graphics card is much faster, or whether they actually fixed the drawing issues in v1.0.1 (or both).
 
Somewhat related... I've also seen sluggish drawing in Melodyne as well. I think part of the problem is when plugins are developed cross-platform, they tend to port OSX drawing algorithms to Windows, while Windows uses different ways to optimize screen drawing (like clipping regions etc). It's not that one is better than the other, it is just that they need to be different if you want to make it optimized.

Since I've been running Sonar I switched to AMD video because I found them to run cooler and quieter than the nvidia performance cards.

ampfixer
Since I've been running Sonar I switched to AMD video because I found them to run cooler and quieter than the nvidia performance cards.

Really? The opposite used to be true (as a rule of thumb), though I haven't checked in a while.

I don't know Dr. Av. There is actually quite a war going on with the NVIDIA vs. AMD (with the fanboys of each anyhow) I prefer NVIDIA but that is for reasons outside the scope of this thread. I will say that AMD has supurior onboard cards than Intel does (as NVIDIA doesn't have one) so in that case, yes AMD/ATI is better.
 
Silk has a point though, a lot of the graphcis stuff is now handled by the GPU even in normal applications. Especially if you are using something ike WIndows 8. All that stuff is offloaded to the card so that the CPU doesn't have to think about any of it. That being said, it's not like you're trying to calculate dynamic lighting between the mixer window and the piano roll, so any card created within the last4 years should work fine. 
 
Some DAWs do have "shiny" options to make things look nicer. For example, FL Studio has a "smooth scrolling" mode which makes the program do everything at about 30-60 FPS which DOES LOOK nice and some of the spectral and EQ plugins do have really shiny looking meters and stuff which generates stuff with some kind of particle type of effect. It's not needed, but it looks cool and is still useful.  As it doesn't slow thigns down (or speed things up in some cases) I just leave them on when in FL. I'm sure Sonar has some thigns like that as well too somewhere.
 

ViRiX Dreamcore
There is actually quite a war going on with the NVIDIA vs. AMD (with the fanboys of each anyhow)

 
That war's been going on for as long as NVidia and AMD have existed....
 
And far too much of that war involves fanboys recycling third or fourth hand hearsay. No different to the Fender vs Gibson thing really, other than an awful lot of that particular pointless fight to the virtual death seems to involve a lot of keyboard warriors who've never owned an example of either.
 

ViRiX Dreamcore
Silk has a point though, a lot of the graphcis stuff is now handled by the GPU even in normal applications.

 
Not just the graphics stuff, finding ways to use the gpu as a kind of secondary high-speed high-bandwidth co-processor to do all kinds of things has been around for a few years now.