Ready to pull the plug. Yup - another goodbye post

[AlainZagar]

I agree. I ran Sibelius and Protools on an i7-8700K CPU @ 3.70GHz. I had to set the buffers to 256 or 512 samples to get smooth playback. Some cores were maxed out while the rest were barely measuring 10%. That wasn't good when Sibelius, Protools and my midi performance needed to sync up. My Command8 didn't work with the motherboard.

Also, tried that trick where you start up Protools and set the affinity from the command line. I even purchased Process Lasso in order to better manage load balancing. I just ended up proving to myself that Protools hasn't been optimized to leverage newer CPUs with Windows. In my opinion, it needs a rewrite on Windows. The one thing that I'm quite certain of is that Protools performance improves more due to more GHz single core performance on new CPUs vs higher thread counts.

There is a very real bottleneck in the Virtual Instrument plugin mechanism with respect to Windows. If you watch the performance counters it's obvious that Protools isn't spreading out the processing to all available cores. One or two cores are pegged near 100% while all of the others are way down with some below 30%. The system usage meter in Protools looks like a triangle instead of a wavy line.

Folks here manage to get a stable system using I3 and I5 machines but I'm quite certain the Virtual Instrument count is low in comparison to the straight analog processing.

Appreciate the feedback and best of luck with your career. Sounds like you're living the dream with that work you do.

Cheers!

Alain

P.S. re. 2021.3 got the graphics problem resolved. Had to override DPI scaling and set it to "System".

P.P.S Midi isn't working for some reason.

[SomeOtherGuy]

Ah, glad you mentioned buffers! With VIs in the mix it's pretty damn near impossible to work with 32 or 64 buffers. I always use 256 as a minimum and with big sessions I go to 512. This doesn't bother me at all. If I didn't do this, I'd get plenty of errors too.

[Southsidemusic]

This is the Longest Goodbye Ever

Maybe we talked you into rethinking leaving ....

[Simon2065]

Parting is such sweet sorrow

[daeron80]

Originally Posted by AlainZagar

[snip] Xeon 5690 6 core CPUs with hyperthreading enabled, several 1 TB Samsung SSDs each. The first has 12gb RAM [snip]
The second machine has 24Gb RAM (ASUS P6T V2 Deluxe mother board can't take more),

Um. Yeah. Sorry, but PT isn't the problem, here, nor is Windows. You're overdue for an upgrade. For composing these days, don't even consider working with less than 64 GB. Maybe as little as 32 GB for beginners and amateurs. 64 minimum for doing actual work. 128 GB for future-proofing.

I recently bought a refurb Windows machine with 24 cores of Xeon and 64 GB of RAM for less than $1000. Big orchestral templates, no hitches at HWB of 64 using an old Firewire interface. It's not that expensive these days to get what you need.