less CPU usage with ASIO?

Discuss music production with Ableton Live.
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Spacerboy
Posts: 594
Joined: Mon Oct 28, 2002 9:35 am

less CPU usage with ASIO?

Post by Spacerboy » Fri Mar 07, 2003 1:04 am

:?: if i use an asio 2.0 supported soundcard instead of the built in sound device of a laptop (with directx/MME drivers, or those emulated asio directx/MME drivers from steinbergs cubase)....should that be less CPU intensive?

thanks in advance,

spacy

sevo
Posts: 27
Joined: Thu Oct 10, 2002 11:53 pm

Post by sevo » Fri Mar 07, 2003 6:49 pm

It will entirely depend on the drivers and hardware. In general, the difference will be quite marginal - compared to the amount of CPU load the software generates, the drivers themselves should be negligible, unless they are positively broken. In Linux (not quite representative for Live, but the only OS where I can profile driver load), the driver to my Terratec EWS88 card will merely generate about 4% CPU load on a PIV 1800 when running at full 8-in-8-out - and that's a fairly unoptimized freeware driver, so I'd assume Win and Mac drivers to be even more gentle on the CPU.

A better card may improve latency, though - but it often will not do so on systems where you already are CPU limited, as lower latencies will eventually increase the load on the software. So you should really make sure that you have a audio interface issue and not a CPU which is too slow, before shopping for another interface.

Sevo

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