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OT: Request for Nuendo and/or Samplitude users [message #66258] Thu, 06 April 2006 19:39 Go to previous message
Dedric Terry is currently offline  Dedric Terry
Messages: 788
Registered: June 2007
Senior Member
Anyone with Nuendo and/or Samplitude (or the demo) interested in a little
experiment? There has been a hardware test thread on the Nuendo forum that
is claiming RME drivers are way less efficient than Lynx and MOTU - okay,
worth reporting to RME, as long as it's really RME and not Nuendo, but that
part seems to be taboo on the Nuendo forum, so I bailed on posting this
there.

So, for fun, or out of frustration more likely I decided to compare Nuendo
3.2 to Samplitude 8.11 (demo) using my RME Digiface (2.94 drivers, latest
full release). I loaded up a single sine wave, copied it to 96 tracks, just
to load the audio engine (don't care about disc streaming). I loaded 8
Gsuite JCM900s (freeware) on the first few tracks and here's what I found,
and what I would like to confirm with other users:

At 64 sample latency:
DAW # JCM900s
Nuendo 15
Samplitude 38

(X2 4400 dual core; A8V Deluxe; 2G Ram; RME Digiface 2.94; etc)

Holy crap - that's over twice the performance. So, does Sam8 not have PDC
at all? I know Nuendo has a long list of other features, such as audio
warp, scoring, midi and VSTi capabilities beyond Sam's, post features, etc,
etc, but that's over twice the performance. I know Samplitude handles it's
own audio buffering internally, which seems to be completely independent of
ASIO buffers, and to some degree seems to ignore ASIO buffers too. At 128,
Nuendo caught up - 39 JCMs. I have no doubt that there is a "sweet spot"
for DAWs, simply based on how they buffer, process and stream data, in what
sizes, etc, so optimal ASIO or internal buffer settings won't be consistent
on different systems, and certainly not between apps, but this seems to be
an extreme difference (I triple checked the test to be sure I wasn't missing
something basic, but couldn't find anythig. Samplitude's VIP buffer was at
2048).

Now, not being a Samplitude user, here's my lack of knowledge - that's all I
could get out of it at any latency in the RME card. Nuendo kept adding more
- over 64 at 512 samples. Why does Samplitude seem to gain nothing from
higher latency at the audio card? I'm sure I'm probably missing something
in understanding Samplitude's buffer approach (I did tweak the VIP buffers
to 8192 to get 38 plugins at 512 samples on the RME, but it seemed to lose a
little performance at higher RME latency - not what I would expect).

The other side of this is Nuendo has low latency issues. This was run with
"Low Latency" off in expert audio settings. With it on, it wouldn't even
run the 96 instances of a single audio file, no plugins, without breaking up
- given what it is supposedly for, that can be reasoned away, but something
about Nuendo's PDC doesn't seem right to me - "disabling" it didn't add a
single plugin to the test results. Nuendo also needs to be restarted when
lowering latency settings or runs much worse than if restarted, and it is
slow to reset the audio engine.

I'm trying to get to the bottom of some longstanding questions I've had
about Nuendo's performance since 3.0, and also since 3.2. Something isn't
right. Any takers to dive into sorting this out?

The Nuendo forum is too volatile right now. Posting this would just cause a
flame war and I'm in no mood to get burned. I'm not partial to any
manufacturer - just figuring out where the weak spots are.

Thanks!
Dedric
 
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