designerwebs
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Joined: 17 Feb 2006
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 Posted: Mon Mar 06 2006 02:12
Increasing performance |
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Although I’ve gotten the program to work reliably, it seems that I’ve reached certain bottlenecks regarding cpu usage, mainly from the use of synths. I’ve noticed that certain synths such as the KarmaFx (which is very cool btw) eat an enormous amount of processing power. So if I have a few power hungry synths running, I’m unable to continue writing, as the cpu indicator peaks and the module locks up.
In attempting to deal with this the only idea that comes to mind is once I program a nice sound, record it as a sample and reload the module with the sample instead of the synth. This is time consuming and less flexible, but seems to offer a solution. Is this a viable approach? Is this what most of you do? If so, what would be the most efficient way to record the sample?
I really don’t think I have a performance problem since I have a Pentium 4, 3.06 and I’ve identified that it does not use hyper threading. My second question is if I were to upgrade from 512 megs of ram to 1 gig, would this increase the performance? (amount of synths running) Since the bottleneck seems to be CPU usage, I think the answer is no, but I wanted to give it a shot anyways. |
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Sunbuster
Registered User
Joined: 05 May 2003
Location: Finland
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Posted: Mon Mar 06 2006 11:08
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If my CPU starts to choke my first try is to reduce the playback quality by removing for instance Hi-Q filters and setting the interpolation to Linear or No interpolation in the config. If that doesn't help then I'll start checking through my song to see if there maybe is something I could optimize, for instance by routing several channels to the same fx and disabling all fx I don't need. At this point I'll also remove all channels that are empty (don't know how much empty channels influence, but it can't hurt to remove them). If that doesn't work then I go to the windows task manager and kill all processes I know I don't need atm. If after all this my CPU still tries to take out sick-leave, then I'll start to think about recording some of the sounds. In other words, I'll go to great lengths in order not to have to record a sound from a VST, because that would mean I'd have to record it again if I want to change some parameter in it (which happens quite a lot with me).
The recording I usually do by simply muting all other channels except for the one containing the synth I want sampled and then exporting a suitable length of the track using the wave export. Then just reload the new sample into madtracker and remove/disable the VST.
You can never have too much RAM, so I'd suggest getting a bit more. I'm not sure about the memory needs of various VST's and Madtracker, but I can imagine that 512MB in the end gets used up pretty quickly, which in turn means that Windows would use the HDD to store things that should be in the RAM, which in turn does slow things down quite a bit. |
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Powerdown
Registered User
Joined: 01 Feb 2004
Location: Kampuhhh The Netherlands
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Posted: Wed Mar 08 2006 21:38
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About the ram. At the moment I create songs with about 40 VST's and I'm using about 400 megs RAM and 400 megs virtual memory, so upgrading is certainly a good option.
Before you change the synths you are using, check how many reverbs you use. these consume a lot of CPU.
Powerdown |
Where the sun blows, Hardcore goes.
So spoke the wise man. |
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vespesian
Registered User
Joined: 25 Jun 2003
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Posted: Sat Apr 29 2006 04:51
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In Task manager, try setting MT2's "priority" to "High" - NOT real time - that seems to help with me (select "processes", and right click on "MT2.exe", chose "High")Just ignore the warning re: system instability....  |
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Inge
Man-At-Arms
Joined: 04 May 2003
Location: Nieuw Lekkerland @ Holland
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Posted: Sat Apr 29 2006 12:58
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There's a vst plugin that you can use to temporarily freeze VST effects. This comes done to the same result as Sunbuster proposed, but then in an environment in which it is easier to change parameters of the plugin afterwards.
http://www.fxfreeze.com |
Care for a game of Monopoly? |
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Inge
Man-At-Arms
Joined: 04 May 2003
Location: Nieuw Lekkerland @ Holland
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