Which mac for Elastic Audio/X-Form

[blastula]

I'm using an early 2009 Quad Core 2.66Ghz Power Mac (16G Ram)
I use Elastic Audio (and the X-Form algorithm) a lot.
As some of you know, it's excruciatingly slow (especially at 96k!)....
Wondering if upgrading Macs would make a big difference for Elastic Audio/X-Form ....and if so, which Mac?

Thanks,
Rob

[Chief Technician]

The amount of RAM you have will not impact Elastic Audio in Pro Tools v10.x and earlier.

Why are you using a tower? Do you have PCIe cards that you need to keep using? I suspect that faster cores will provide the greater benefit than the number of cores. The only way to know would be to do some testing against a baseline.

[JFreak]

Which hard drives are you using? I bet EA is using a lot of disk i/o and if you use faster/more drives you will see better performance.

That 2009 Mac Pro is plenty fast for heavy EA and 16GB memory should also be enough.

[8dB.co.uk]

Are you running 10 or 11? Plugin processing is a LOT slower in 10

[blastula]

Still at pt9 (hd2)
with a uad-2 card (pci-e)
12 GB Ram
My drives are Hitachi and WD 7200 SATA


My sessions arent huge, but i use a lot of plugins at 96k and i use elastic audio a lot
willing to move up to 11, to hdx...
as i am under the impression that it will be a much smoother faster experience...(?)
just wondering if it's gonna help out with elastic audio/x-form.
And wondering if a top speed imac is better for that than a mac pro.
Or if there's much benefit to a 12-core over a 6 core (of equal speed).

Thanks

[8dB.co.uk]

Big benefit to going to 11, 64bit and as many processors as possible. Hdx isn't involved with things like elastic audio and x-form - that relies on host processing grunt, and ProTools being able to fully utilise the power of the host, which PT11 can, but PT9 can't. PT11 takes seconds to do renders that take minutes on PT10 and below.

[Chief Technician]

Originally Posted by 8dB.co.uk

Big benefit to going to 11, 64bit and as many processors as possible. Hdx isn't involved with things like elastic audio and x-form - that relies on host processing grunt, and ProTools being able to fully utilise the power of the host, which PT11 can, but PT9 can't.

You may want to consider these observations regarding Turbo Boost and the New Mac Pro’s CPUs.

[blastula]

Thanks all, great stuff.

I checked out the link and the charts, Jonathan.
The way I understand it, when choosing a computer, and how many cores, it still boils down to the app.
and how well it makes use of the multiple cores.
Still looking for that info (or opinions) regarding Pro Tools 11...

[8dB.co.uk]

ProTools 11 is the first version of ProTools that properly utilises all the cores available, dynamically, in the 64bit domain. In 32bit versions - v10 and earlier, ProTools simply threw all its native processing demands as one lump to as many processors as you defined in the playback engine settings. In 11 you no longer have this option, and ProTools dynamically shares the processing load across all your processors. This leads to much more efficient processing, which leads to alot more processing headroom. Sessions which ran at 75% on ProTools 10 now run at 23% on ProTools 11, on identical hardware.

[blastula]

thanks again...upgrading to hdx pt12 presently