WIn 7 visually set for best performance but performs worse.

[eggnchips]

Hey chaps,

Ableton on my laptop suffers from freezing and audio drop outs when visual effects are set for best performance (basic mode) in Windows 7.
It was the same also with Vista.
Just out of curiosity, why is this?

[mickybeautron]

I have found in over ten years of using and attempting to optimise windows for audio that sometimes certain things don't seem to have much of an effect. Turning off visual effects can help the gui and probably frees up a bit of memory, but freezing and audio dropouts can happen for a number of reasons. From too slow a processor, to not enough ram, to having a poor soundcard, to your audio buffer settings in Ableton, as well as many more (poor graphics card affecting the gui, hard drive fragmentation, damaged file system or registry etcetera etcetera. The list is near-endless)
I would recommend having a look at your audio buffer settings in ableton preferences/audio. If you're not aware, the larger the buffer number the less stress on the system, but the trade off is higher latency. Increase the buffer and you'll get less clicks/dropouts. You have to find a happy medium between the two. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nKTSTW_LFV4

If you haven't already done so I would recommend to have a search for optimising windows 7 for audio on google.

[Nilus]

Shared memory or stand alone graphics processor?

[agent314]

Could be the opposite - because of how the GUI is done in Win7, it will use the graphics card to render Aero stuff (transparency, semi-3D, etc.) which takes the strain off the processor

Have you tried running it with some/full Aero features? Mine runs better in normal mode than in Basic

[eggnchips]

Yes, I ususlly run it with all the graphic features on. It works fine like that.
I am just curious to know why it stutters in performance when the features are off, when it should actually run better.

[agent314]

It's because when it's in basic mode, it's moving all processing resources away from the graphics card (such as you'd presumably want for gaming or rendering, when you want to minimize GPU usage by system processes)

If you're using something that's CPU intensive (such as running a DAW with lots of devices+VSTs), you want to minimize the CPU hit for graphical processes. Turning Basic mode on actually hurts performance, because instead of the graphics processor doing all the work, the CPU has to figure it in along with all the other tasks it has at hand.