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| Nuendo / SX Benchmarks :. |
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| Blofelds DSP 40 - Page 2 : Audio Hardware Comparison :. | ||||
It became evident very early
on during the development stages that there was enormous variance in
results at lower latencies using numerous audio cards that I and others
had at our disposal , in that respect , the decision was originally
made to restrict the official qualifying to 1 -2 high end professional
audio cards. |
Unfortunately the variances were far more than expected, even to the point that on the Intel DualCore systems, the Session was unable to be run with any consistency at any settings below 512 Samples on the RME cards. What initially started out as a benchmark to test outright system performance quickly became an exercise in testing ASIO driver efficiency, or lack there of. The ongoing testing over the following months produced a wealth of information regarding the variances that were also being experienced with not only the ASIO driver efficiency of the different audio hardware, but also inter- relationships with chipsets, memory bandwidth as well as the respective driver / buffer implementation being employed. |
One of the most surprising and widest variances reported
was when simply saving and re-opening the session at the loaded setting
would result in some cases the need to dis-able a large number of plugins
for the session to successfully be able to playback cleanly again. This was more pronounced at Buffer settings below 512 Samples, and is clearly evident in the following graphs. The other thing to take note is the dramatic and over proportional improvement with certain audio cards at the overclocked settings, more so on the Intel Systems. |
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| AMD X2 - Audio Hardware Comparison | ||||
The selection of Audio devices include both PCI and Firewire units, the variance in the results at the lower latency settings give a reasonably clear indication of the performance deltas that can be experienced on this particular test with the respective units. |
Its evident that the PCI cards
collectively perform a little better than
the Firewire units on the initial test, despite the Firewire devices
having an added sample buffer to compensate for the inherent latency
of the Firewire protocol. |
The most pronounced variance displayed is in saving and re-opening the session. In this case the results are more reflective of the subtleties of the respective ASIO driver / buffer implementation being employed. |
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| AMD X2 OC - Audio Hardware Comparison | ||||
| The results for the Overclocked settings on the AMD systems scaled proportionally for most of the audio cards listed, the notible exception being the RME Fireface, which performs substantially better. | This is hinting at other variables at the
subsystem level which can effect overall performance of this test. The pronounced difference in performance when running 1T or 2T memory timings on the AMD systems |
with certain audio cards is well documented, where as it doesn't effect other cards. Again that is reflective of the subtleties of the respective ASIO driver / buffer implementation being employed. | ||
