Kontakt System Benchmarks

I have been looking for some system performance benchmarks with Kontakt and so far, I haven't found anything. If anyone knows of a place where this data might be stored, that would be great. If not, would anyone be interested in contributing some anecdotal system performance evidence? I'm interested to learn how Kontakt performs on other sytems, how much of a load it is on the CPU and under what conditions it seems to react the worst. My own exeperiences have been mixed.

 

Hello Zero,
I don't have lots of numbers to crunch but here is some feedback based on practical performance.
From the Mac platform I can tell you this: a G3 at 500mghz just doesn't cut it. Any large instrument such as a grand piano or synth will max out the CPU like crazy. I'm not sure if the DFD update fixed that or not as I switched to a G4 1.25ghz at that time. Smaller instruments (memory wise) such as percussion worked just fine on the G3.
On the G4 Kontakt runs wonderfully with no problems. It is very stable.
I operate both the stand-alone version of Kontakt and as a plug-in within Cubase VST32 ver5. I'm still having a few crashes when in Cubase but can't attribute that to any particular reason just yet. I also run SampleTank1. I've used 5 instances of Kontakt simultaneously with a few of SampleTank and that doesn't seem to stretch the CPU much at all. It stays down in the 10% range just about all the time now on the G4. On the old G3 all I had to do was put in a piano and hit 6 notes and the CPU would go crazy and the machine would lock up. More CPU power= the good life.

 

win XP

Thanks for the feedback. I am running Kontakt stand alone on a laptop running Windows XP. It's a Athlon 1800+ XP processor and I've got 512 MB of ram. I would suspect this should be more than adequate for Kontakt, but as soon as I open it up, it's using 40% of the CPU and when I am sending it MIDI, it's closer to 60%. I was using this configuration with a USB Quattro that just didn't work after I tried to install Cubase SL, so I ditched the Quattro for an Echo Layla. With the Quattro, the CPU went from 8% - 90% on this fluxuating curve... just kept bouncing between the two, but I never noticed any problem when playing back samples other than the occasional pop. Now, with the Layla, the CPU sits at around 60% and whenever I move an element in Kontakt or expand an instrument to edit it, the audio glitches.

I wonder if others have noticed anything similar?

 

Kontakt usage

I have a P4 2.4 GHz system with 1 GB of memory. I've been running 8 instances of VST version of Kontakt within Sonar and it uses about 20% CPU just when idol. All reverbs are disabled as each instance uses 2-3% CPU. Also, DFD is disabled for a library that I'm beta testing.

I'm loading memory up with about 150 MB free on the latest piece I'm working on and it only takes around 30-40 seconds to load everything which is quite amazing when compared to GigaStudio on my other machine. I'm using maybe 150 notes of stereo polyphony with about 60% CPU usage. With DFD enabled it would probably about max out the system but I would have at least 512 MB of memory free.