I have been waiting since I installed and started using X2 to see any posting about the lower CPU usage. I have noticed on older projects from 8.5 and Expanded, the CPU is significantly reduced! The other threads in my quad seem to be working more consistently as well. Has anyone else noticed this? Like I said, I haven't seen too much said about this. I know that the engine has been tweaked a bit but this is showing a significant difference. Anyone else?

Sidroe


I have been waiting since I installed and started using X2 to see any posting about the lower CPU usage. I have noticed on older projects from 8.5 and Expanded, the CPU is significantly reduced! The other threads in my quad seem to be working more consistently as well. Has anyone else noticed this? Like I said, I haven't seen too much said about this. I know that the engine has been tweaked a bit but this is showing a significant difference. Anyone else?

  Yes I have noticed this, seems to be better load spread across cores, but human nature means we only hear about the things that are bad.  

I honestly can't say that I've noticed Sidroe. When I first installed X1 a couple of months ago I noticed that my first CPU thread got the most hammer and then perhaps the second thread. The other six threads were a bit erratic. I found a post here about "core parking" and I turned this Windows feature off. Since then, I still find that my first CPU thread gets more use, but the remaining seven threads are a lot more equally used.

In X2 I have not noticed any improvement on this.

cheers

andy

In X1 on the same template I've noticed that the first core got hammered  to 25-30% more than the others, now it's more spread out and the first core doesn't seem to take such a high load.

I agree that the first core is still taking the biggest hit. It looks like the hit is not near as big as in X1 and the other cores are more active.

I have never had to use core parking because I have never had so much problem with my cpu that I thought it necessary. I know the core parking threads have been done to death. Is it really that much of a gain across the board to use core parking?

Sidroe, no, you'll want to *disable* core parking (if it's enabled). It's probably already disabled. Here's one of the forum threads on it: http://forum.cakewalk.com/tm.aspx?m=1861804

I have a torture-test of an X1 project that I opened in X2 and did not notice any CPU utilization changes either in raw numbers or distribution across the cores. Other projects might vary, of course, but that's my report.

I have my 8 gig of RAM unganged. The guy who set my PC up said this distributes the load better over 4 cores.. I'm not sure what he meant, so I just carried on regardless. Would anybody else recommend "Unganged"

unganged is best for quad-cores and for multi-threaded applications. ganged is best for single-threads that use a lot of memory. to my knowledge, Sonar does a bit of both. i don't think i'll will matter much. i would probably stay with unganged as most apps are multi-threaded these days.

but, the difference is very small either way. and it's about memory bandwidth which has very little to do with audio engine performance. the biggest thing for Sonar is CPU (the floating-point benchmarks).

even for gaming where you have a lot of texture swapping cases where memory bandwidth matters, the benchmarks i've seen where like 0.1 percent different. there are many other factors and settings to worry about that will have a more dramatic effect on performance.

I too am getting a more equal spread across all my cores. Boy, imagine someone from 100 years ago reading that sentence.