So we were chatting about this on another thread, but I thought I would bring it up again.
I’ve got an i7 with 4 cores that uses hyperthreading given 8 threads, so as far as Windows is concerned I have 8 cores. But Ableton will only use 4 of them. I have email Ableton technical but so far they haven’t been very helpful.
I would like to know if this happens for everyone. So if you have an i7 could you run a large track and open task manager and look how many CPUs are being used?
I have an i7 as well and I see the exact same behavior and it is puzzling me.
Ableton only seem to use half the “cores”, also when Ableton Live 8.21 reports that it is using 99 % cpu (and sound is beginning to crackle) the taskmanager reports that the overall cpu usage is around 30 % and max 50 %.
It seems that i7 has so much more to offer, than Ableton is able to utilize.
Has anyone tested this with the newly released i7 core version 2 cpu’s that Intel has just launched (Sandy Bridge).
Hey, I have emailed Ableton about this and I got a really lame answer. They said it was because Ableton is 32bit and my OS is 64bit. I have asked them again a couple of days ago, but I haven’t had anything back yet.
I’m hoping for a 64-bit Ableton as I keep running out of memory for Ableton way before I run out of processing power despite the challenges above. Using the Freeze feature doesn’t help only Flatten frees up memory, but is also irreverable.
Ableton finally got back to me with a conclusive answer:
[quote]
Dear Anthony,
Thank you for getting back to us.
Ableton Live doesn’t support hyper threading so it can only use 4 out of 8 threads. It also can only use the CPU from the 4 actual cores. If that’s really 50% is hard to tell.
There’s nothing you can do to improve things, but your computer is new and fast and should work fine with Ableton Live.
Please do not hesitate to ask if you have any further questions.
Ya, the I7 is only a 4 core processor… Meaning 4 physical cores… It shows up as 8 if you have hyperthreading turned on… theyre 'Virtual" cores if you will…
I did disable hyperthreading and I ran some tests using the Ableton performance thing from the Ableton forum, and using my on tracks. Using the performance test I got dramatically better results with hyperthreading turned off, 30% with it on and 18% CPU with it off. But on my own tracks the gain was very small, like 1 or 2 %.
I recently bought a pc with an i7 processor and I had problems with the cpu spiking with an average amount of tracks. I did an eliminating process with the plugins one by one to test if they were causing issues. Turns out Lexicon Reverb was making my track spike and have audio drop outs.
Another problem I had was with my soundcard. I was using mmex instead of asio as the sound card driver. I had to download a driver called asio4all and that made the asio option available, this greatly enhanced the performance using Ableton.
[quote]gofunk (21/01/2011)[hr]why dont you disable hyperthreading in the bios the you will be able to use all cores to full potentail when using ableton[/quote]
Have you tested this? If so, what is the practical performance difference?
[quote]jasperhb (10/02/2011)[hr][quote]gofunk (21/01/2011)[hr]why dont you disable hyperthreading in the bios the you will be able to use all cores to full potentail when using ableton[/quote]
Have you tested this? If so, what is the practical performance difference?[/quote]
[quote]jasperhb (14/01/2011)[hr]Yes I’m on 64-bit too.
I’m hoping for a 64-bit Ableton as I keep running out of memory for Ableton way before I run out of processing power despite the challenges above. Using the Freeze feature doesn’t help only Flatten frees up memory, but is also irreverable.[/quote]
What if you duplicate the track, freeze and flatten the new track, and then keep the original track but turn off all the plugins on it and deactivate all the clips in the track? That way you still have your original track saved but in theory it shouldn’t be taking away any processing power. I am not certain of this but it is worth trying for now.
i’ve wondered about this many times. i have an i7 as well and have found the cpu spikes just like everyone else. it’s disappointing because that was one of the main reasons i forked over the $$ for the i7!
[quote]TheAnt (10/02/2011)[hr][quote]jasperhb (10/02/2011)[hr][quote]gofunk (21/01/2011)[hr]why dont you disable hyperthreading in the bios the you will be able to use all cores to full potentail when using ableton[/quote]
Have you tested this? If so, what is the practical performance difference?[/quote]
Yes I did, see my reply two posts up. :)[/quote]
Ups Sorry about that
Well, I tried it too, today on a track that I am currently working on and I don’t get more juice out of my CPU with hypertreading off - at least not anything that really makes a difference.
[quote]djcoma1200 (10/02/2011)[hr][quote]jasperhb (14/01/2011)[hr]Yes I’m on 64-bit too.
I’m hoping for a 64-bit Ableton as I keep running out of memory for Ableton way before I run out of processing power despite the challenges above. Using the Freeze feature doesn’t help only Flatten frees up memory, but is also irreverable.[/quote]
What if you duplicate the track, freeze and flatten the new track, and then keep the original track but turn off all the plugins on it and deactivate all the clips in the track? That way you still have your original track saved but in theory it shouldn’t be taking away any processing power. I am not certain of this but it is worth trying for now.[/quote]
Yes it can be done on individual tracks. With group tracks I don’t believe that it is possible, but then it is possible to render all tracks and import them to a new project and work from there. It can be done, but it is cumbersome.
Sorry about that 