PHARLIGHT Asio/CPU discussion

Hey guys, Did some testing with Pharlight today and was curious if any of you have had similar results

I ran Pharlight within an existing Cubase (latest build) project of about 6 vst tracks with 3 fx sends (wasnt an extremely demanding project, the 512 buffer would sit at about 20% usage with all of these channels active and producing sound).

After adding a Kontakt (Latest patch) instance of Pharlight in this project, sending a dry signal directly to stereo out the cubase asio usage maxed out when playing a 3 note chord on almost any of the presets alongside the existing instruments of the project. The kontakt window cpu bar for Pharlight further showed 50% usage when playing notes.

I was confused at this result so i opened a single instance of Pharlight in a new blank project and its usage still shot up to around 35-45% on the Cubase Asio meter and 49-50% cpu usage on the Kontakt cpu meter (tested with multi core proccessing both enabled or disabled (12 core)).

Wanting to make sure this wasnt a Cubase problem i opened Protools (Latest build) and ran the plugin both on KK and Kontakt with similar results. Running two concurent instances of this plugin resulted in almost 100% usage in Protools core #1 (asio) and around 35% usage on 3 of the cpu core meters. This was across both a 1024 and 512 buffer at 48khz, 32 or 24 bit (Scarlet solo 3rd gen).

This is on a (Windows 10), Intel Core X-SERIES 7800X (6 core, 8.25MB Cache, 4.0G Hz), With T-Force RAM(16 GB, DDR4@3200mhz), Running the plugins off an m.2 SSD drive (NTFS) with the content libraries located on a 2tb internal SATA hdd (NTFS)

I further attempted to run an large amount of plugins and fx at the same time to establish whether my hardware, or a recent software change was the issue. I tried a multitude of Native Instruments XY style plugins similar to Pharlight, Omnisphere with granular mode activated and the maximum amount of voices, and finally a bunch of Kontakt multi sample orchestral libraries and synths all at the same time with individual FX inserts.

These instruments still did not overload the meter (~85%) or reach close to Pharlights usage (which caused crackling) even though all of these instruments are installed in an identical way to Pharlight and on the same storage devices and the same hardware/software configuration.

On the plus side im really enjoying the unreal sounds this plugin can make by itself however i was wondering if this plugin is unusually demanding for any one else, or are they still ironing out bugs/making optimisations with the instrument?

 

Yes, Pharlight just as Straylight does need quite some CPU.

 

Ah i was hoping it was an error, so these numbers are to be expected?.

Its strange that you wouldnt be able to run one or two instances in the context of a small sized unfrozen mix. I havent even tried routing Pharlight into FX channels yet but i assume it will be almost maxed by itself alone?.

 

Yeah those numbers are about to be expected, but some DAWs fare a bit better than others.

 

Hi,

I had downloaded the Demo version of Pharlight and everything seems to work ok, however, I too noticed under Transition using sound Appearance, the crackling is out of control. Is my computer outdated for Pharlight? I am running 3GHZ Dual Core I7 Processor With 16GB RAM. A lot of the sounds seem fine, but the crackling on some of them seems crazy.

John

 

Yes, having a quadcore and more GHz would have been better.

 

I get that this is an Asio discussion, but for the sake of comparison I want to chime in to say that my 8-core i9 MacBook Pro with a base clock speed of 2.3 ghz (boosts to 4.8 under load) and 32GB of DDR4 really struggles with a handful of presets, such as The Wall, when more than five notes are played simultaneously, pushing the cpu usage to up to 100% (and that's even with the buffer set to 2048 samples at 44100) in Ableton Live 10.2.14. Insane crackling and static! But the great majority of the time Pharlight works just fine for me, even on low buffer settings both using the stock sounds and when loading in my own samples. My machine has never hiccuped once, no matter what I've thrown at it until I picked up Pharlight. I am no expert, but I'm guessing there's probably some kinks to be worked out. Love it though!

 

No, it's just that some presets really are that demanding. There's no kinks to be worked out, it's how it is.

 

Playing with the demo this afternoon...looks like I'll have to go in...the sale cutoff is tomorrow. Can user samples be imported and does the sale end 5/31 (tonight) at midnight or tomorrow 6/1 at midnight. Im PDT

 

Yes you can use your own samples.

 

Hi Guys, I've beeen getting some drop outs in Pharlight, with CPU showing 100%, with chords being played. I realise it's a CPU hungry application, but wass interested to see Task Manager only quoting my CPU as running at 25-40%, while the Kontakt meter is 100% in the red? I'm running an 8 core FX 8350 @ 4GHz, with 32Gb of Ram and fast SSDs, so had hoped for a little more stability than is showing. Any thoughts, much appreciated.

 

How is Kontakt's multicore option set up in Options?

 

Hi, Cores set to 8, CPU overload disabled (I did try killing voices option, which slightly improves issue, but doesn’t solve it).

 

Yeah in that case that AMD FX is running out of steam. Well, it IS also a pretty old CPU by now...

 

Yeah I thought that might be the problem...I am surprised that Windows Task Manager doesn't see the same high CPU usage though. Guess I'll be ordering a new Mobo, CPU and Ram then! Thanks for your Help

 

I ended up setting my ASIO to "Safe mode" (via checkbox); no idea what that actually does, but it largely mitigated the issue.

 

I guess Maschine shows singlecore percentage load of the most loaded core, while Task Manager percentage load of all cores power....

It sort of makes sense. If one core has troubles to handle the load in time, than 100 cores doing almost nothing will not help.... Saying that, one needs enought all cores power and enought one one core power for the most power hungry thread....

At least it is my understanding of the things....

 

My PC:
Intel i7-3930K / 3.20 GHz / 6 Cores / 12 Logical Processors / 32 GB Ram / Windows 10 Pro / Studio One Pro 5.
It is not capable of handling this library; so I need a new one.
Can someone tell me what is the best processor chip for this crazy thing?
Thanks!

 

The more GHz the better.

 

Hi Ed. I'm considering building my own but I'm confused about GHz vs Cores; there are too many variations.
In my case, I run Studio One with a ton of Kontakt & Plugins.
Any idea what the "best" chip out there is?
I'm hearing a lot of talk about AMD Threadripper; with the drawback of no Thunderbolt ability.