Windows 8 Pro and PTHDN 11

[Greg M]

I finally decided to do some more experimenting with PTHD 11. I had it installed on my "main" workstation (Win 7 Pro (x64), i7 960, Gigabyte X58 MoBo, 12 GB Ram, etc.) but went ahead and installed it on the computer now shown in my signature.

While I don't have everything installed (all my plug-ins) on this Win 8 computer I am amazed at how much more stable PTHD 11 is. Also, while it's early, I also don't seem to be having trouble with the Sonnox AAX64 plug-ins that I had on the Win 7 Pro computer (they would crash PTHD11).

For Win 8 to not be "supported" for PTHD 11 it seems to be performing very well (hope I don't have to eat those words), so far, better than Win 7 Pro (x64). I did most of my comparisons using the PT 11 Demo session.

The other thing that seems different is that there seems to be an optimum H/W buffer size. Bigger buffer is not always better.

Anyone else seeing this kind of stuff?

And....while I'm speculating :), makes me wonder if maybe the plug-in companies have written their AAX64 plug-ins for Win 8 (x64) and are waiting for Avid to officially support it for HD before releasing their plug-ins. Hard to believe they would develop for OSX but are having trouble with Win 8.

Greg

[Shan]

Originally Posted by Greg M

The other thing that seems different is that there seems to be an optimum H/W buffer size. Bigger buffer is not always better.

Anyone else seeing this kind of stuff?

The buffer for playback tracks is now at a fixed high buffer setting. Only the buffer for record arm tracks is user definable. If you're changing the buffer for testing purposes and only playing back audio tracks, you won't see any difference.

Shane

[Greg M]

Shane,

What I was doing was looking at the CPU usage as I changed the H/W Buffer setting. CPU usage was higher at 1024 than 256 then went back up as it was lowered to 32. I understand about the playback buffer vs record buffer. This testing was only done in playback mode. With playback only I didn't expect to see any change in CPU usage as I changed the buffer, but it did change and I'm not sure why. BTW, I saw this same thing with Win 7.

Thanks,
Greg

[guitardom]

11 is "officially" supported on Windows 8. 10 is not officially supported but runs great. I am running them both as a co-install.

IF Sonnox is not running right on your W7 rig then something is up. I am running all the Sonnox stuff on both W7-W8 with no issues.

system resources are changed as you change the HW buffer. It will still fluctuate with the buffer though what Shan said about it and tracking is correct. There are some quirks though. IF you drop the buffer to low for the session (specifically heavy sessions), sometimes it will read as extremely low. I have been given the technical reason why that is, but I cant explain it well typically though PT will become problematic when this happens.

Another thing to notice with 11, your CPU will change and fluctuate as you play and stop or as tracks with different plugins go in and out with and without audio. Another wonderful feature of 11.

[Greg M]

I guess I missed that PTHD 11 was officially supported on Windows 8. I knew that native PT 11 was supported.

There have been several people report problems with the Sonnox AAX64 release (ver 2). My other system was the DUC i7 960, X58, Win 7 x64 build and has always been rock solid. The Sonnox plugs on PTHD 11 on that computer were the first to ever have an issue. There was even a guy on a Mac with the problem. It was a surprise to me. Anyway, seems to be resolved with Win 8.

I'm sure there is some resource allocation work that needs to be addressed in 11 (I don't know if it's an Avid or Propellerhead issue). Rewiring the latest 64 bit version of Reason to PTHD 11 was/is problematic on W7 x64 in that Reason runs on only 1 core/thread and will max out the CPU load on that core/thread and crash PTHD 11. That doesn't happen with PTHD 10.x. I haven't tried rewiring Reason with PTHD 11 on Win 8 yet.

I guess what I'm reporting here is that, to me, it looks like PTHD 11 and AAX64 plugins run better/more stable on Windows 8 than Win 7. I don't have time to figure out why, but it was a very pleasant finding for me. However, at some point the resource allocation quirks need to be sorted.

BTW, I have both PTHD 10.3.7 and 11.0.2 installed on the Win 8 computer.

Thanks,
Greg