SAC 64bit

[operationwhat]

Anyone running SAC in Win8.1 64bit?

[Bob L]

SAC is a 32 bit app... it will run fine in Win 7, 8 or 10, 64bit OS.

Because of the design of the Windows XP priority scheduler, SAC will obtain its highest performance in XP. Win 7, 8 and 10 modified the thread scheduler and voids much of the thread priority handling causing a degradation in stressed performance, although they can work fine when running the SAC engine under 50%.

Bob L

[rdubost]

Because of the design of the Windows XP priority scheduler, SAC will obtain its highest performance in XP. Win 7, 8 and 10 modified the thread scheduler and voids much of the thread priority handling causing a degradation in stressed performance, although they can work fine when running the SAC engine under 50%.

Bob L
Hi Bob, long time no post, hope you are doing fine.
Some process management utilities claim to take over Windows default process handling, for instance Process Lasso (https://bitsum.com/) and Project Mercury (http://www.techcenter.dk/).

Is there a chance they could mitigate the performance hit you are refering to or is the "high priority" option in SAC doing the same thing ? This utils do require elevated rights, which SAC does not unless mistaken.

A smaller mobo with 35/50W TDP CPU, smaller PSU, NVME SSD... would fit in 1U rack space with little heat and ventilation issues. All with higher single threaded IPC. Very powerf... -strike this- desirable ;) But XP won't touch such a system, meaning a recent Win kernel and loss of some of the higher IPC, unless something can be done about it.

Is there a fight to be fought ?

Best regards,
Roger.

[Bob L]

Working on a solution now with one of the Reatime Extensions type environments for the Win 10 platform... we'll see what happens.

Bob L

[rdubost]

That's very good news indeed. Thanks for this! MS, Intel and AMD conspiring to block support for all Windows but 10 in next gen cpu's will definitely hurt SAC and Sawstudio. This is awful.

I was considering playing with Linux and virtualization on Vt-d enabled systems, see how a pci-e RME card behaves when hooked to XP in a virtual machine. Little hope for close enough to real time but you never know.

If you can come up with something, this will open the door for tiny, yet powerful mixers, comparable to DSP based Totalmix with SAC awesomeness. Count me in !

[cgrafx]

That's very good news indeed. Thanks for this! MS, Intel and AMD conspiring to block support for all Windows but 10 in next gen cpu's will definitely hurt SAC and Sawstudio. This is awful.

I was considering playing with Linux and virtualization on Vt-d enabled systems, see how a pci-e RME card behaves when hooked to XP in a virtual machine. Little hope for close enough to real time but you never know.

If you can come up with something, this will open the door for tiny, yet powerful mixers, comparable to DSP based Totalmix with SAC awesomeness. Count me in !


I occasionally run SAW Studio on my Mac under parallels with an XP VM and it works well enough to do 24 track mixes on.

[rdubost]

I occasionally run SAW Studio on my Mac under parallels with an XP VM and it works well enough to do 24 track mixes on.

This sounds promising, provided SS live mode runs OK with that many tracks. Live mode is a different kind of realtime audio altogether... I suspect the SAC engine has evolved quite a lot since SS but your experience is still very welcome.

Can you please share specifics, maybe hardware, sound card, ASIO settings? That would be great. While I have no plan to go mac or even hackintosh, freebsd or Linux prolly have some kind of parallels close cousin...

Another interest of virtualization would be to run a multi client remote desktop server -either a patched xp or a Windows server- and offer SacRemote to non Windows clients. I found that the rdp protocol works best for that application, at least the XP version.

[cgrafx]

Nothing special about the setup.

2008 Mac Pro
Dual 3.2 Quad Core Xeon Processors (Single processor core assigned to XP)
Parallels handles sharing of the audio hardware.

I have a pair of Alesis M1 Active 520 USB monitors and a Motu Ultralite Mk3 Hybrid (USB/Firewire, connected via Firewire)
I previously had an Echo Audiofire 4 that worked as well.

You just have to tell the system which OS to connect to when you plug them in.

I've done single channel voice overs but haven't tried live mode. I occasionally fire up SAC on the system as well, but just for reference when I need to check out interface stuff.

[rdubost]

Wow ! 8 cores and 16mb L3 cache... if OSX does a good job with vt-d, XP might just be happy enough and behave close to hardware.

The sound cards wouldn't help for real time in Windows, virtualized or not, I think. USB audio is mediocre at best with generic drivers and sub-par USB management from XP. I've heard good things on the Motu MK3 but just in OSX.

LGA1366 based chipsets all have native PCi : an old, possibly cheap, HDSP Pci would probably allow for much lower latency, all things being equal. Rme is still issuing drivers and Totalmix for the HDSP line dating back from 2001...

As for the powerful hardware in your mbp, I have one of these xeons quads, just a tiny bit younger, with 12mb cache and .32nm process. SAC digs, a lot! It clocks at 4.5ghz with tight memory. It's a shame to feed it 3GB RAM when the mobo can handle 48... Those synths I'd like to run... This rig is the very reason for my interest in virtualization. You could probably upgrade yours for a pair of x5675 ($150 on the bay) and see how it feels with 12 cores, 24 mb cache, higher clock and lower TDP. I suppose the Bios on a dual CPU mobo doesn't allow for overclocking ? 4ghz would be neat ...

Now imagine the same performance ballpark in a 1U rack with a 120W PSU, barely any heat to dissipate... I for one would retire the Xeon (along with the bulky mixer rack) and get one of the upcoming Kaby Lakes with next Crystal Well design, truly acting as 256mb victim cache. I believe this would make for the fastest digital mixer ever issued, possibly with the ability to run huge synths in parallel. All in a tiny footprint! That's what Bob's current work with W10 -I suppose it's about this (http://www.sybera.com/index.htm?navto=realtime.htm)- can possibly bring to life for me. You bet I'll keep my credit card ready ...

[cgrafx]

Now imagine the same performance ballpark in a 1U rack with a 120W PSU, barely any heat to dissipate... I for one would retire the Xeon (along with the bulky mixer rack) and get one of the upcoming Kaby Lakes with next Crystal Well design, truly acting as 256mb victim cache. I believe this would make for the fastest digital mixer ever issued, possibly with the ability to run huge synths in parallel. All in a tiny footprint! That's what Bob's current work with W10 -I suppose it's about this (http://www.sybera.com/index.htm?navto=realtime.htm)- can possibly bring to life for me. You bet I'll keep my credit card ready ...

My live SAC rig is basically what your talking about (based around an RME RayDAT)

1.5U 13" deep MicroATX chassis, 4GB RAM, SSD, 3.2GHz Core i5 running XP. (Its quiet and very cool)

I'm looking at updating that system to Win10.

Was considering swapping the motherboard to the newer intel chipset, more RAM, a faster core i3 processor and use PCI Express SSD. System would likely boot in 10-15 seconds, and would support some other software that would benefit from the newer operating system.

[mr_es335]

Hello,

Using the following: ASUS Z170-P, Intel Core 6M Skylake 3.2 GHz LGA 1151, i5-6500, Samsung, 850EVO 120GB Solid State, G.SKILL Ripjaws, 16GB (2 x 8GB) V Series and WIN7 Pro - system boots in 15-18 seconds.

[Cary B. Cornett]

Some process management utilities claim to take over Windows default process handling, for instance Process Lasso (https://bitsum.com/) and Project Mercury (http://www.techcenter.dk/)..
Has anyone tried to use either of these utilities on a SAW or SAC rig? I'm tempted to try with my new laptop, but don't want to wreck things in a way I can't reverse. Hoping for answers/advice on this.

[cgrafx]

Has anyone tried to use either of these utilities on a SAW or SAC rig? I'm tempted to try with my new laptop, but don't want to wreck things in a way I can't reverse. Hoping for answers/advice on this.

Make a backup of your current configuration and if the utilities don't work, restore the backup.

[Bob L]

From looking at the info about these utilities, (although I could be reading this wrong) it appears that they are designed to do exactly what SAC does not want... it seems that they will try to load balance all running processes by lowering the higher cpu loading threads priority ... like the SAC main realtime threads of the mix engine itself... this is exactly what we don't want.

Bob L

[mr_es335]

Bob,

...it seems that they will try to load balance all running processes by lowering the higher cpu loading threads priority......this is precisely what these utilities are doing.

[Cary B. Cornett]

I did some more reading. Both Project Mercury and Process Lasso work by changing priorities of processes. I forget which does which, but one works by pushing background processes down and the other by elevating the preferred process. In particular, Project Mercury makes sure the window with focus has highest priority.

I am interested to know whether what these do is similar to the internal "high priority" and "realtime priority" options in SAW, and whether either of these utilities does so more effectively in Windows 10.

[Bob L]

Once again... the problems are enhanced in Win 7, 8 and 10... because the new schedular attempts to do load balancing... effectively ignoring pre-programmed priorities... as well as the fact that with multi-cores all priorities become almost meaningless because if any core accesses RAM all other core threads that need RAM access are shutdown.

Bob L

[Carl G.]

Once again... the problems are enhanced in Win 7, 8 and 10... because the new schedular attempts to do load balancing... effectively ignoring pre-programmed priorities... as well as the fact that with multi-cores all priorities become almost meaningless because if any core accesses RAM all other core threads that need RAM access are shutdown.

Bob L
Sounds like MS is convinced that their Round Robin Scheduling is best for the populous. If only they could make more scheduling options available to the user to fit the user's need.

[PhaseShifter]

Close, but not quite.

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ms685100(v=vs.85).aspx

[tubetonez]

Curious if any testing was done over the years on XP 64 bit? While the SAC app is 32 bit, could the available RAM >4G be an advantage?

I've been planning to experiment with passing through a PCIe card to OS guest using VMWare. I'm a systems engineer, and have done considerable amount of work in VMWare environment but haven't needed this feature - meaning the "guest" OS has exclusive access to the hardware card. Of course there are any number of virtualization platforms, most have some similar feature.

For exacmple, I understand that many folks are running a WIN7 media center VM, passing through a PCIe digital Tuner card. This combo is able to stream live HD video to multiple clients. Also, for NAS virtual appliance, the OS can live in a VM and have direct access to the storage controller.