Notice that the disk meter in the CPU Usage window hovers around 40%. If a lot of plug-in parameters were automated it would probably be a different story. 41 tracks of volume automation clearly doesn’t put a very heavy extra load on the processor. Turning off the automation with the ‘Suspend’ button in the Automation window, doesn’t do much to reduce the CPU usage. Although there is a slight hickup when opening a plug-in window revealing that this is a cpu heavy session. System Usage respectively during stop, stop with Dynamic Plug-in Processing turned on, and during playback.During playback the faders follow the automation reasonably smooth and the track meters are still accurate, even when opening plug-in windows. The track count might not seem impressive at first, but remember that the session has a 96 kHz sample rate, so all plug-ins process at 96 kHz. The Master track has the same Linear Phase plugin followed by Native Instruments’ Solid Bus Compressor and a T-Racks Brick Wall Limiter. The Instrument track contains Massive followed by the same seven plug-ins from the audio tracks. The Aux tracks each have an Oxford Reverb plug-in followed by the T-Racks Linear Phase EQ with the oversampling and linear phase function switched on. These are two Sonnox Oxford EQ, one Oxford Dynamics, one Native Instruments Driver saturation/distortion, a T-Racks Classical EQ, the Elysia Niveau Filter and a T-Racks Quad multiband compressor. All tracks, except for the Master and Aux tracks, contain seven plugins. The track counter stops at 31 mono Audio tracks, 10 stereo Audio tracks, one Instrument track, three Aux Input tracks and a Master track. In this session it drops to somewhere around 10% with the option turned on.ĭespite the jumpy CPU bar the session runs very well and I can even record an extra track with a low enough latency at a 128 sample buffer size. Do remember that I turned off the Dynamic Plugin Processing option, otherwise the CPU bar would drop immediately when not playing. When playing, the processor of course knows exactly what has to be processed and therefore might give a better estimate of the CPU Usage. Perhaps because when idle, the meters only show an estimate of the processing. I have no idea why the meters respond like this. It even shows the occasional red 100% bar when doing absolutely nothing. A funny thing is that when Pro Tools is stopped, the CPU Usage meters are a lot more jumpy then when Pro Tools is playing. And to be alerted when Pro Tools has received an error during processing, I turned off ‘Ignore errors during playback/record’.Īll tracks of the test Session in the Pro Tools Mix window.During playback on the old Mac Pro, the CPU Usage window hovers somewhere between 80 and 90%. To have an honest comparison with Logic in a later post, I turned off the Disk Cache and Dynamic Plugin Processing options. The playback buffer size is set automatically in Pro Tools and can’t be altered manually. Even though this is the Input Buffer meant for low latency during recording, it still reserves some CPU power when you are only playing back. The Hardware Buffer Size is set to 1024 samples. At the moment of writing it runs the latest version of Pro Tools HD, which is 11.1.2.Īt first the Playback Engine settings are set to get maximum performance out of Pro Tools. The session was initially created on the 2007 Mac Pro to push it to its CPU limits. Later we’ll see how many the new Mac Pro can actually cope with if there are lots of plug-ins on the tracks. Using these session specifications, Pro Tools 11 HD is able to run a maximum of 128 tracks natively. The test session runs at 96 kHz and 24-bit. The 2013 Mac Pro has the HD Native Thunderbolt box variant with the same HD OMNI Interface connected during testing. The 2007 Mac Pro has an Avid HD Native card installed with an HD OMNI Interface connected. It has 16 GB of RAM, dual D300 AMD FirePro graphics cards, and I’m running the session off the same Seagate drive housed in a FireWire 800 enclosure connected to one of the Thunderbolt ports using an Apple FireWire to Thunderbolt adapter. The other Mac is of course a late 2013 Mac Pro with a 6-core Xeon E5 1650 V2 ‘Ivy Bridge’ running at 3.5 GHz with Turbo Boost to 3.9 GHz.
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