HD Native and Mac CPU not performing.

[tomhenry]

Dear all...

I'm running a
MacPro
# Two 2.4GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon “Westmere” (8 cores)
# 12GB (4X2GB)RAM
# 1TB 7200-rpm Serial ATA 3Gb/s hard drive
# ATI Radeon HD 5770 1GB

With an HD Native Card and an Omni Interface (with the latest drivers).

I am on OS 10.6.8 and i have PT10.2 and the latest version of Ozone 5 Advanced (5.02) and Altiverb.

I am having seious CPU chokes even with modest loads. An example sesion would be 30 voices, 15 Channel strip plugs, 2 Altiverb plugs and 1 Ozone 5 advanced plugin on the master. Things go especially pear shapped when i view the Ozone Meter bridge. My audio starts to stutter and my CPU randomly flicks red indicating its maxing out although I'm sure my system should handle this.

I have tried all Play back engine alternate settings and even with a 2048 buffer and maximum resources alocated the problem still happens.
I have tried all Ozone 'options' including different frame rates, buffers and EQ bandwidth as per Ozone instructions.

There weird thing is the session is happiest with 4 cores (out of 16 selected in the playback engine ?? Im running no other programs. My Mac is testing fine.

My HD /Mac should easily handle this?? Somehting is wrong and i don't know what??

Sometimes even the 'Dynamics' page alone will trigger these problems. This page has the most graphics (animation) so maybe its related to this.


Any advice apprecited.

[nst7]

You list one hard drive. Are you recording your audio to a separate hard drive or to your system drive?

[BobbyDazzler]

I have a similar setup and whenever I have the plugin visible, and edit the controls, I see the most CPU errors.
I don't have Ozone though, and most of my errors go away when I up the buffer.
Definately stick to less CPU cores, I find 3 or 7 works well for me.
Do your preference trash and repair permissions.

[Darryl Ramm]

It will suck mightily if the audio sessions are being stored on the system drive. But in addition to that have all the Pro Tools recommended optimizations for Mac systems been done (and checked recently--they have magic ways of undoing themselves)? Running WiFi or having spotlight running on a disk volume or not following any other of the standard optimizations can all cause horrendous problems at times.

If you are still having problem after doing and double-checking all that, post all the playback engine dialog panel settings here.

You can look for other posts here by me on hyperthreading, but you don't really have 16 cores, you have 8 physical cores (split across two 4 core chips) and 8 more virtual cores (4 on each chip) thanks to hyperthreading, what those virtual cores do if anything is very workload/plugin dependent. So be prepared to experiment. A good place to start (especially with unstable systems) is 7 or less RTAS processors (that leaves one full real core to run Pro Tools itself). A dual CPU system also has overhead in going over the QPI interconnect to connect to caches on the other CPU chip. That may explain performance knees seen around 4 processors (one reason a 6 core system may outperform an 8 core (=2x4 core) system, again its very workload/plugin dependent).

Darryl

[woodsdenis]

The only time I have seen this is with Ozone 5. I got the demo and this exact same scenario happened. Something strange going on there. Upped buffers and it went away.

[tomhenry]

Thanks all for your replies.

Sorry i forgot to include... I'm recording to an internal Hitachi 3TB Deskstar 7K3000 (not to the system drive).

I've tried all the recommended optimizations and no luck. For me selecting 4 processes seems to create the best result (the least splating..!). I think im dissapointed with this cause i bought a power Mac for Native thinking i want heeps of power and now i can only tap into a quarter of it...?

My other settings in the Playback engine:
CPU usage:95%
Ignore errors on playback is ticked.
Delay comp: On (and active)
RAM Cache:4 gig
DAE playback buffer: 4


I have tried many different configs and these setting seem to work best.


Any further direction would be great.

Can i somehow better use more cores? Im convinced the graphics are causing the chokes....Could it be the video driver or something like that??


Thanks Tom.


ps. I've read all the posts on cores and hyperthreading...but can't find any Mac option to turn on/off.

[CME]

There is no way to turn off hyperthreading on a Mac. At least that I've seen. Maybe could be done via some serious terminal hacking. And just because you have selected only 4 cores doesn't mean you're not using the others. They're just doing other non-realtime code. Just for kicks take the Ozone plug out of the plug-in folder and move it to the desktop. Start pt and see how much a difference that makes. If so that could be your problem. Some plugs are just problematic.


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

[Darryl Ramm]

On disabling hyperthreading: This is supposed to work, but I have not checked it (and note the need to reboot). http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1196970 However I really see no reason a user should really be playing with this.

It sounds like the OP has tried to optimize the Ozone 5 internal settings. Did that include turning off low latency mode inside Ozone? Disabling EQ spectrum? etc. And hope the sequential tuning instruction in the documentation were followed (on the fly adjustment of buffer sizes etc. while watching CPU meters for relative changes). My expectation is this should be done just with the Ozone plugin running in a test session.

If you disable all the other plugs what happens to Ozone does it become a lot more robust? Check all those other plugs are up to date.

This may just be something that needs to be taken up with iZotope support.

BTW if you have a 8 physical core system and setting 4 RTAS processors and getting somewhat reasonable performance/utilization that is close to using half, not a quarter of the system. Hyperthreading never really gives you 16 cores. Also be careful of over analyzing/over-trusting utilization meters. Sometimes without a horribly deep understanding of what is going on its hard to know if these even mean something real.

BTW its never been mentioned what sample rate this is all running at. Really hope its not 192 kHz.

Darryl

[tomhenry]

Great... thanks for your advice Darryl, i'll try those suggestions.

I have tried all options in the Ozone plug including Low Latency Monitoring but i will try again in a test session.

The current session is 88 K, 32 bit floating.

Do you think disabling hyper threading may help? And do you know how to issue a "terminal command" as suggested on your link... i'm not that Mac smart.

Appreciate your help... i've spent waaay too long looking at CPU meters and not nearly enough mixing..!

cheers
Tom.

[SMonkey]

Originally Posted by tomhenry

Thanks all for your replies.

Sorry i forgot to include... I'm recording to an internal Hitachi 3TB Deskstar 7K3000 (not to the system drive).

I've tried all the recommended optimizations and no luck. For me selecting 4 processes seems to create the best result (the least splating..!). I think im dissapointed with this cause i bought a power Mac for Native thinking i want heeps of power and now i can only tap into a quarter of it...?

My other settings in the Playback engine:
CPU usage:95%
Ignore errors on playback is ticked.
Delay comp: On (and active)
RAM Cache:4 gig
DAE playback buffer: 4


I have tried many different configs and these setting seem to work best.


Any further direction would be great.

Can i somehow better use more cores? Im convinced the graphics are causing the chokes....Could it be the video driver or something like that??


Thanks Tom.


ps. I've read all the posts on cores and hyperthreading...but can't find any Mac option to turn on/off.

Ive just noticed this same problem with my setup:

2009 Mac Pro Quad
HD Native w/Omni 10.2
10gb ram
120gb OWC Solid State boot drive
2x1TB Media Drives SAMSUNG HD154UI
Snow Leopard 10.6.8
UAD Quad + Solo PCI cards v6.3..

I also have OZone 5 for a couple months, but never noticed or even seen errors like this current problem..but the plug is not on any of my current session either..

I get all the same errors as you with my sessions..ive noticed the same problems with an 80+ track session and also a 10 track session for a mixtape..