Protools occasional "ran out of cpu power"

[athlon64]

Hi!
So i have just set up my new lenovo P50 mobile workstation.
i7 6820hq, 32 gigs of ram, quadro m2000m and an NVME SSD.

I'm running protools 12.5 and i am really happy with how it runs. It's very smooth.

But just like with most other configurations i used to work on i sometimes get a "protools ran out of cpu power" error, while the cpu is not exceeding 30% load across al cores.

On average i run something like 20 track sessions with about 3 plugins a track. Most of them are fab filter eq's, compressors and gates, with some SSL channel strips from waves and a few instances of izotope ozone. A few reverbs as well.

So nothing that would overload my quadcore i7.

I realised that the protools ran out of cpu power error is not really realted to the lack of cpu power, but the fact that protools is very sensitive to latency problems. So what i did to make this problem happen less often is i used the lenovo performance tuner, to change processor affinity settings and load a special power profile i created in windows, just for protools.

What this does is locks the cpu at 3.2 ghz, no downclocking. And it gives protools affinity on 3 out of 4 cores. This means that protools only uses 3 out of 4 cpu cores but all the other running programs only run on the one remaining core. Not touching the 3 cores that are there for protools.

This significantly reduces the amount of "ran out of cpu power errors" i get and gives me the ability to do other things like searching the web while protools is running the mix in the background. Without these optimizatons protools would give me the "ran out of power" error as soon as i tried doing anything parallel while protools is running the mix.

With these optimizations, while mixing, i might get the "ran out of power" error maybe once an hour at worst. i just click okay and keep working so it's not much of a problem.

But i was wondering do other people also have this problem with protools 12.5 and can something more be done for optimization.

I have a focusrite 2i4 interface and i use it's ASIO drivers.
I keep the buffer at 512 for mixing but with this laptop it goes down to 128 or even 64 with no crackles.
I have protools 16 out of 32 gigs of ram in cache settings.

[mjslakeridge]

Did you do all of the optimizations for your version of Windows and PT as detailed in the "Additional Resources" link at the top of this and every other forum page? Ideally, you would not be running other tasks like searching the web while PT is open. I disable my network adapter in Device Manager except when I am backing up sessions to another computer on my home network.

And for editing and mixing, you should set the buffer at the highest level of samples, to ease the load on your cpu. Only when tracking (recording) would you set it to a lower buffer level.

[athlon64]

Originally Posted by mjslakeridge

Did you do all of the optimizations for your version of Windows and PT as detailed in the "Additional Resources" link at the top of this and every other forum page? Ideally, you would not be running other tasks like searching the web while PT is open. I disable my network adapter in Device Manager except when I am backing up sessions to another computer on my home network.

And for editing and mixing, you should set the buffer at the highest level of samples, to ease the load on your cpu. Only when tracking (recording) would you set it to a lower buffer level.

I did the most important optimizations like disabling turbo boost and c-states. I also did the affinity thing which in a way simulates giving protools a free environment to run in. Other processes are not using the cores that protools is running on.

Honestly, i usually mix while in the background there is firefox with 70 tabs opened, together with 10 other apps running in the background.
I don't have a problem with investing in a high end computer but after i do, i expect maximum commodity. And turning off other apps to run protools is not even close to that.

The thing is. My previous HP Zbook G1 didn't have a single problem with this. I don't think i ever saw a run out of power error on it.

On the P50 it's really nothing major. But ocasionally it will pop out.

So i fugured this migh be closely related to DPC latency since the zbook was the first machine i ever had that, no matter what you did on it, you couldn't register a single driver having a latency of over 1ms ever, using DPC latency checker.

On the P50 the GPU drivers, ACPI drivers and network drivers sometimes will hit 2-3ms max. But it doesn't cause any problems with the machine. It runs perfectly. Except for the ocassional ran out of cpu power error in protools. But it really happens very rearely.

[guitardom]

Hello,
You should probably use Latencymon and detect the drivers that are causing issues. On laptops, things like irst can cause all sorts of issues. Usually with laptops I recommend wiping out the factory install and do a completely clean install and not install all of those excess drivers like that.

[athlon64]

Originally Posted by guitardom

Hello,
You should probably use Latencymon and detect the drivers that are causing issues. On laptops, things like irst can cause all sorts of issues. Usually with laptops I recommend wiping out the factory install and do a completely clean install and not install all of those excess drivers like that.

ACPI.sys ,dxgkrnl,sys ,nvidia windows kernel mode drivers and sometimes the tcp.ip driver.

Nvidia drivers and Wd01000.sys jump up the most.

Those are the four driver that tend to exceed 1ms under the "highest execution" tab in the latency monitor. Nope, updating them didn't help.

The thing is, i don't think this is solvable. My old T540P had the identical problem. Nothing could help. The latency would jump with fresh windows and just a few basic drivers installed. I think it's related to hardware.

However you can't feel any problems corelated to this while using the computer.
Is it the reason i sometimes get the ran out of power error. Maybee...

[athlon64]

Hmm seems that most of the DPC spikes are caused by mu quadro M2000M gpu changing clocks. When it goes from a low speed to a higher clock the dpc latency on nvidia driver spikes.
But i don't know if i can force it to boost clocks all the time