Churst wrote:In response to the original post and question posed in the title: Not really...
I just upgraded quite significantly from a Core 2 Quad based machine with 8GB of DDR2 RAM to a Core i7 six core with 32GB of DDR3 RAM. The RAM in the new machine is also running in quad channel configuration, and at double the clock speed of the old DDR2. Both machines were/are on Win 7 64bit.
Live, in it's current form is simply not capable of using the resources on offer. My CPU meter in Windows is registering a peak of 20% usage but quite often as low as 4%. Obviously the RAM usage is limited by Live's 32bit nature, but the sheer speed increase on offer seems to have little bearing. Live's resource monitor however is showing exactly the same resource usage as on my old machine, between 30-45%, unless I'm running NI Studio Drummer, in which case in excess of 50%.
From using Live on the new machine quite extensively the actual feel of Live, under the same sort of plugin heavy load, has improved quite a bit. The additional thread processing from the 2 additional physical cores, and then Hyper Threading on top of that, make the user experience much more fluid. Unfortunately I don't seem to be able to run a whole lot more without the same old issues popping up. I can maybe squeeze in a couple more VSTi's and a few more higher quality effects.
It was quite disappointing really to only have such a small improvement, when the new processor architecture is vastly more powerful than the old one. It is a little saddening that Live is actually less capable of making use of your computing resources than most video games.
Jeez man, that's quite disheartening to hear... This is why I'm hesitant to squander the best part of grand on a new machine without doing as much research as possible first.
I feared also that Ableton's limitations wouldn't make proper use of the new hardware and from what you have said, this seems to be the case...
I may have to do what was suggested earlier and simply freeze a number of the channels which are running instruments. We're probably stuck with this cap in performance until they finally implement 64bit support.