Frustrating Pro Tools Performance on a Nuclear Submarine System

[DanVictory]

Hello!

First post from myself.

I've been using a 2012 macbook pro throughout the majority of my career in audio and recently upgraded to a monster 16 core 5950x windows system for post and scoring at home during lockdown.

Wow night and day performance for batch processing, cubase, ozone and generally just flinging plug ins onto inserts without the machine even blinking.

My issue however, is that Tools seems to never utilise anything near the performance potential of the system. I was working on a farily beefy post project recently and during playback I started experiencing drop outs. I opened up the performance monitor and it looked as if only 1 core was being fully utilised with the rest hardly awake..

Is this normal behaviour for Tools??! Is there no way to enable the software to spread the load across more cores evenly?

The system flies on ableton and especially cubase, so I'm disturbed af that my main money earner and the DAW I use almost every day doesnt work well on my system

Should grabbed an ARM mac mini!

Cheers in advanced for any insight you folks can offer.

D

[daeron80]

For a post session you're not tracking, typically, so you could increase the HWB to max as a workaround. Freeze tracks that you're done with. That sort of thing. I use my Windows machine mainly for composing, and it does a nice job of spreading VI load across cores. It may be that it handles things poorly when a huge number of tracks are all using the pretty much the same set of plugins or something.

[Darryl Ramm]

Start at help us help you up top of every DUC web page... and post a SiSoft Sandra report.

And beyond that there are many many posts on DUC about Windows systems optimizations. Have you done the standard optimizations? Every last one? Bios settings etc. Have you tried CPU priority and affinity settings discussed in those many recent posts on DUC?

Besides Sandra, much other info is missing, what exact Pro Tools version? IO buffer size?, session sample rate?, interface and driver version?, and what standard troubleshooting you might have tried... trashed prefs? Tested with just the standard .aaxplugin files installed? Tested with starting with a new empty session? Tested with the demo session? etc

What AAE or other error are you getting? Uncheck ignore errors and hopefully you will see specific issues.

Wether plugins spread their load across multiple CPUs is very workload and plugin related. And Pro Tools can be worse than some other DAWS especially if you deep chain plugins/tracks. We cannot guess what plugins you are using to do what with. Looking at the Pro Tools CPU meters often especially gives a misleading impression of what is going on. Stop looking at meters and focus on troubleshooting the real problem like dropouts (or hopefully you can make them into AAE errors, then fix those), starting with the standard troubleshooting steps.

[Obsidian Dragon]

Originally Posted by DanVictory

Should grabbed an ARM mac mini!

Although the New ARM Mac mini has shown some impressive performance and several folks have been able to run Protools on it. It is still official not certified due to the following:

1. Big Sur has yet to be certified for Protools.
2. Protools is still running Intel code through Rosetta translation
3. The current line of M1 based Macs are limited to the RAM options on the ARM processor carrier (8GB and 16 GB). While I was able to have Protools load using 8GB RAM, the minimum requirement states 16 GB RAM. If you use VIs, and larger plugins, that limited RAM is bound to run out of room. Unlike the previous generation of Intel based Mac minis, the RAM is not upgradable.

Back in the Windows side of things, be sure to do the optimizations suggested.

[jeff markham]

Originally Posted by Obsidian Dragon

Although the New ARM Mac mini has shown some impressive performance and several folks have been able to run Protools on it. It is still official not certified due to the following:

1. Big Sur has yet to be certified for Protools.
2. Protools is still running Intel code through Rosetta translation
3. The current line of M1 based Macs are limited to the RAM options on the ARM processor carrier (8GB and 16 GB). While I was able to have Protools load using 8GB RAM, the minimum requirement states 16 GB RAM. If you use VIs, and larger plugins, that limited RAM is bound to run out of room. Unlike the previous generation of Intel based Mac minis, the RAM is not upgradable.

Back in the Windows side of things, be sure to do the optimizations suggested.

I'm not that intrepid. Big Sur is a big release and I think came out of the oven a little too soon. The M chips can execute the Intel instruction set much like the Intel chips executed the PowerPC instruction set did (back in the day) in a pseudo virtual machine. It's not going to be as efficient as compiling for the ARM instruction set.

I'll wait .. and I would caution against trying PT on the M stuff until its officially supported. I guarantee you'll hit a significant issue.

As far as multi-core usage. Protools will utilize the cores for plugins and instruments. I have noticed that it doesn't distribute to the
other cores as efficiently as I would expect, however.