An idea to save CPU...

As we all know, massive can get pretty well... massive! when it comes to the use of CPU, especially when you have a complex multi-layered synth sound working its ass off in the project, and it can put a right load of strain on your PC/Mac. This is what I think of massive anyways as 1. it is my all time favourite soft synth and 2. i am always making complex pad sounds and soundscapes with it, which is the cause of the high amount of CPU usage. There are a couple of things that could be implemented... Does massive support multiprocessing? I haven't done much research into this but I used to run a quad pc with about 2.8GHz processor speed and 4GB RAM, and on shifting to a dual iMac with 3.06GHz, i've noticed that the CPU percentage readings for the sounds have been about the same, very slightly lower on a mac by like 2% or something for the more intensive sounds. Is this simply because Massive runs better overall on a Mac (apart from the cubase issues) and that the processors are about twice as powerful, or is it because the slightly higher processing speed has caused it to have slightly less CPU usage? If it is the second answer, i'm guessing that Massive is not multiprocessor compatible, but I would like to hear from the developers or a good source whether this is a correct statement or not... any answers from NI? (I was running everything on highest quality mode, as I can notice a big difference in Eco mode and arrrgh it drives me nuts!)

Also I have been noticing that more and more plugins are starting to use DSP cards both internal and external to power their particular brand of plugins, with some supporting third party plugins like the PT|HD Accel cards (Supports Waves TDM, Sonnox TDM and others). I had a test run with a load of Waves C4 compressor plugins on a very old Mac G5 PPC a few days ago just to see its limits, and it was surprising to see how many instances that the Accel cards could run, without starting to steal CPU resources, I had at least 30 C4's active and that was with 1 DSP card. Maybe it would be good if NI made their plugins TDM compatible, or developed their own DSP card or external DSP device which could run instances of all NI plugins. As some people like me and a few others I know work on iMacs, it would be awesome to see NI developing a rackmounable external DSP processor which could power NI's plugins like Massive, so that when more complex synth sounds are being used the CPU won't be suffering from the load... and which could be daisy-chained so you could add more processing power as you needed it. Thinking of something like the PowerCore idea and thought how cool it would be if NI followed this way of thinking. Then people who haven't got the huge amount of money to get a decent mac pro and a protools HD system (no really, the good systems start at over £2000 for a Mac Pro and £6000 for a (BASIC) protools HD system!) could still get some DSP power for NI's processors. Could be something like the NI SuperCharger or something like that lol.

 

No. 95% of the plugins out there don't. Why? Latency; it takes around 5 ms to handle thread distribution. Almost all the plugins you see that multithread are your big sample players such as Kontakt.

As for DSP cards, Generator (a precursor to Reaktor) ran on a DSP card. Will NI go that way in the future? Who knows; I sure don't.

ew

 

Thanks ew, i didn't think much about the latency issues involved...

I hope NI will make an external firewire powered DSP card for their plugins so we can get more instances going and make even crazier and more layered sounds

 

...or you can just save up for a new i7 CPU with DDR3 RAM

I think DSP cards won't be necessary especially with the VAST power in today's graphic cards, just waiting to be tapped into.

 

I for one would rather not see NI move to add-on cards. I agree that the cards offer a LOT by increasing the number of VSTs you can run, but as EvilDragon notes, today's graphics cards are stepping in to fill that void (perhaps he's not so "Evil" after all?). I've even seen free VST effects that take advantage of nVidia's CUDA.

If NI does move toward add-on cards, I'd hope they'd continue a version of each product for those of us who don't want/don't have room for/can't afford/whatever the hardware-based version. I realize that's probably not practical, though.

 

Hmmmm... I am sure NI would keep the original non-DSP versions, like Waves do, they have Native ones which run off your CPU and TDM ones that run off the DSP cards you get with ProTools|HD, that makes it accessible for everyone (although Waves plugins cost an arm and a leg for the good ones...) but thinking about it, it might put NI up a notch if they start releasing the DSP. NI could perhaps make a DSP card that powers any of their plugs within any DAW environment, and then when you buy the software they release normal ones for people who don't need many instances or who can use graphics cards to help run them better when the tech is tapped into, and DSP ones which run off your DSP card. That way you can either buy the normal software without worrying about the DSP card(s) depending on how much power you need, or you can get a DSP card with the DSP versions.

Its a shame you can't open the back of an iMac and start adding things here and there as it voids your protection warranty... I would love an i7 processor with DDR3 ram as it would help me out when it comes to plugin count... But then again I only just got my iMac last August, which I now realise I should have waited to get a Mac Pro or until the Quad iMac was launched... I know the Quad is i7 as well aaaargh...:angry:

 

That's not a bad idea! I don't know how much R&D it would take for them to do something like that, but as long as it didn't raise the cost of the software, it seems like it would be a win/win scenario.

Yeah...the one thing about Macs is that they always seem to have an upgrade out as soon as you get yours home! It's almost as bad on the PC side, and I was sucked into that race for a while. Now I just take what solace I can in knowing I was able to produce nice some music with my (now) five year old PC--something I couldn't have done 10 years ago when most of this stuff wasn't even available.

 

5 ms? No it doesn't take anywhere near that, unless you're distributing work to other computers on a network or something.

Multicore support is something you want to do at the host level, since the host is the only thing that has a complete view of what's going on in your system. You don't want every plugin to spawn its own sub-threads when you have 10 of them running in a project...

As for DSP cards, i doubt NI will ever go that route. The whole idea behind the company when it was founded was that CPUs are getting fast enough that DSP cards are not needed anymore. That's why it's called Native instruments (in this context, native means running on the host CPU). NI has never shipped a DSP based product, the card that came with Generator was an audio interface (IIRC they did that for latency reasons).