Pro tools with windows vista

[bassman733]

I am thinking of up grading my windows from xp to vista. are there any major bugs in vista that i should be concerned about, does protools run the same in vista, and any pros or cons that i should be aware of.

[sunburst79]

Originally Posted by bassman733

I am thinking of up grading my windows from xp to vista. are there any major bugs in vista that i should be concerned about, does protools run the same in vista, and any pros or cons that i should be aware of.

Dont, No, No and XP runs about 25% faster.

[bblue]

There is a school here that believes the above, however, my installation of Vista has been rock solid, and every bit as fast as XP Pro once you get it tweaked out right, and some of the unneeded services and window dressing removed.

It's been a great upgrade for me. That's Vista Ultimate SP1 32-bit.

--Bill

[fredson]

i guess u better leave it on window xp cuz vista will need more plug in update , does Vista Ultimate SP1 32-bit works well on PT , i was thinkin of upgrading vista to sp1 but digidesign said it only surport vista without SP1 ?????

[bblue]

It works fine with SP1. I think they mean that it hasn't been officially tested on SP1. There are so many improvements and fixes to the original Vista, I wouldn't run it without the service pack.

--Bill

[Shan]

Originally Posted by bblue

There is a school here that believes the above, however, my installation of Vista has been rock solid, and every bit as fast as XP Pro once you get it tweaked out right, and some of the unneeded services and window dressing removed.

It's been a great upgrade for me. That's Vista Ultimate SP1 32-bit.

--Bill

And that's the problem. Vista takes up valuable ram that PT needs and you get a big performance hit over XP as many of us have demonstrated previously because of this. We've had Quad systems drop from 183 D-Verbs to 115 D-Verbs just from Vista alone. Dont forget that D-verb is one CPU pig compared to other plug-ins and that's a massive hit. By the time you gut Vista to pieces to get the footprint down to 400mb or so of ram usage, you might as well be running XP or Server 2003 because that's what you'll be pretty much looking at after the slaughter job. Vista is a massive downgrade in performance.

Results are results and I opt for a gazillion slutty plug-ins and tons of VI's in our sessions...and for the guys who run at 96k like yourself, every single drop of CPU counts.

Windows 7 on the other hand will be a whole other story as it's ram footprint is 450mb and they incorporated Dynamic Services which systematically turn on and off only when needed. Not to mention it's very well optimized for multi CPU usage.

Shane

[bblue]

Originally Posted by Shan

And that's the problem. Vista takes up valuable ram that PT needs and you get a big performance hit over XP as many of us have demonstrated previously because of this. We've had Quad systems drop from 183 D-Verbs to 115 D-Verbs just from Vista alone. Dont forget that D-verb is one CPU pig compared to other plug-ins and that's a massive hit. By the time you gut Vista to pieces to get the footprint down to 400mb or so of ram usage, you might as well be running XP or Server 2003 because that's what you'll be pretty much looking at after the slaughter job. Vista is a massive downgrade in performance.

Results are results and I opt for a gazillion slutty plug-ins and tons of VI's in our sessions...and for the guys who run at 96k like yourself, every single drop of CPU counts.

Windows 7 on the other hand will be a whole other story as it's ram footprint is 450mb and they incorporated Dynamic Services which systematically turn on and off only when needed. Not to mention it's very well optimized for multi CPU usage.

I too am looking forward to W7 but not at least until the official release or a public RC2 or so release.

You know, I came from the XP Pro "I hate Vista camp" and was an early XP Pro BETA tester in the late 90's, maybe 98 or so. Up until a few months ago I was adamantly against anything to do with Vista. But at the same time was getting quite fed up with annoying "been there for years" bugs in XP Pro (like crashing explorer, and the ever creeping page file, to name but two) on larger installations. Plus I had been using XP Pro on DAW's since 1999 (at least) and had it pretty well dialed in.

But I found myself wasting time tracking down really weird OS/device/driver bugs that would suddenly pop up out of the blue on too frequent an occasion. That plus the need to reboot often for paging file size, etc., kind of pushed me toward investigating Vista.

Mid-year I built up a triple boot system which included XP Pro, V32 Ultimate and V64 Ultimate (in the hopes that next release of PT would support 64-bit. Wrong!) I took me a little while to thin Vista down, get rid of the stuff I absolutely had no use for, and simpify the UI, but after that it was a delight to use. I was also able to move back and forth between the same version of PT (7.4 at that time) on the same PT sessions and drives on the Asus P5B Deluxe q6600 board. In every comparison (operational, not Dverb) Vista seemed to outperform and behave smarter than, XP. It is far more resiliant, much smarter with plug-ins and finding the right ones, with a quickness about it that I hadn't had in a while. XP continued to do well, but didn't have the more polished feel to it. I know that's subjective, but that's what I relied on.

My base Vista is about 750Mb including extra utilities that I run, four virtual desktops, two monitors and is not services-crippled like I've heard some setups described. It boots quickly, file i/o is excellent, etc. Never any BSOD's, no paging problems, no explorer problems,etc. Quick boots, quick shutdowns, no surprises...

I'll try the Dverbs test later and see how it fares.

I don't at all doubt what you say about XP Pro, it is lean and mean, but to me Vista just seems more mature overall. I won't be returning to XP Pro even though I still have it available on the system.


--Bill

[bblue]

I tried the Dverbs test with PT8, by just designating 32 tracks and filling as many inserts with Dverb as I could. I assume you can use the second inserts group on each track as well?

Anyway, with RTAS processors set to four with a threshold of 90%, and the playback buffer to 1024, I could add 202 Dverbs before RTAS processing held at 90%. If I removed a couple I could get into record and hold at 90%. It didn't matter if my plug-ins directory was empty (except for Dverb) or full. And there was plenty of memory not being used.

That's quite a bit lower than any of the Quad machines in the Quadzilla thread, all of which are running XP Pro.

**XP or Vista? The Quad below using Opteron 2214 CPUs gets 115 Dverbs with Vista and 183 Dverbs with XP. Do not use Vista, you'll gain nothing and lose everything. Add the performance hit we get in PT 7.4 with Vista and we are not making progress, we just went back in time.

If we were to assume the same ratio of 63% produced by the above statement comparing the max Dverb counts on the example motherboard, it would make my 202 equivalent to 321 if I was running XP. That sound about right?

--Bill

[Shan]

Originally Posted by bblue

I tried the Dverbs test with PT8, by just designating 32 tracks and filling as many inserts with Dverb as I could. I assume you can use the second inserts group on each track as well?

Anyway, with RTAS processors set to four with a threshold of 90%, and the playback buffer to 1024, I could add 202 Dverbs before RTAS processing held at 90%. If I removed a couple I could get into record and hold at 90%. It didn't matter if my plug-ins directory was empty (except for Dverb) or full. And there was plenty of memory not being used.

That's pretty bad considering the CPU you have. So, the first thing that comes to mind is which D-verb? Run the test again with the old D-verb algo.

If we were to assume the same ratio of 63% produced by the above statement comparing the max Dverb counts on the example motherboard, it would make my 202 equivalent to 321 if I was running XP. That sound about right?

As you know, it depends on what one did to the O.S. but at stock settings, that looks about right. I get 275 D-verbs(old D-verb Algo) with stock settings on my Q6600 Quad with XP. With your CPU, you should be getting WAY more than that.

Since I run a native rig like most of us here, my only choice for an Operating System is for Pro Tools performance only which is why I'm in XP. It's just a tool for my job and Pro Tools is what I use for my full time day job. Windows 7 on the other hand has been a whole other ball game. At this early stage of testing with PT 8, Vista will no longer even be considered because of the huge performance increase when using PT and the XP users will finally be able to move on and be very happy. Let's hope that Microsoft doesnt gut this one to pieces at the end of the beta cycle like they did to Vista when they ripped out the Longhorn kernel, of which all the drivers and UI etc was written for. That stuff initially was never meant for the server 2003 kernel.

Shane

[bblue]

Originally Posted by Shan

That's pretty bad considering the CPU you have. So, the first thing that comes to mind is which D-verb? Run the test again with the old D-verb algo.

As you know, it depends on what one did to the O.S. but at stock settings, that looks about right. I get 275 D-verbs(old D-verb Algo) with stock settings on my Q6600 Quad with XP. With your CPU, you should be getting WAY more than that.

That was with the version 8 Dverbs. I moved in the version 7 Dverbs and the total is now 257. That makes the ratio more like 80% to compare Vista to XP with PT8. Now I'm getting curious what I'd see with PT8 in XP on this same hardware...

Since I run a native rig like most of us here, my only choice for an Operating System is for Pro Tools performance only which is why I'm in XP. It's just a tool for my job and Pro Tools is what I use for my full time day job. Windows 7 on the other hand has been a whole other ball game. At this early stage of testing with PT 8, Vista will no longer even be considered because of the huge performance increase when using PT and the XP users will finally be able to move on and be very happy. Let's hope that Microsoft doesnt gut this one to pieces at the end of the beta cycle like they did to Vista when they ripped out the Longhorn kernel, of which all the drivers and UI etc was written for. That stuff initially was never meant for the server 2003 kernel.

I certainly hope not. I just can't imagine why they would do that, except for deadline/release issues. Which begs the question, what kernel was Server 2008 based on? Do you know?

--Bill