Live 12 on the new Ryzen AI Zen 5 CPUs

[b1rdie]

Hey all, I’m wondering if anyone has had any experience using live on the brand new Ryzen AI zen 5 laptop CPUS, i am considering buying one but i have noticed that AND has done the split core system for the first time. Similar to intel’s Performance and efficiency cores. I am worried that like the intel chips, these chips will only have ableton utilise their P cores and in turn actually get fairly significantly less performance than what you would expect when comparing these laptops using standard benchmarking .

I guess this is also a question for the lovely folks at Ableton to ask if they have done any testing on these new laptop cpus

Thanks in advance

[[jur]]

I have no idea about the specs of these chips, but if they are new I wouldn't worry at all.
CPUs are monsters these days. Even if some efficiency cores are not fully used by Live.

[ruttje]

Sooooo. I was wondering the same as I am looking for a new Laptop at the moment. I was critical about [jur]'s comment and expected the new cores to underperform - but I was shocked at how bad they seem to work with Ableton. I plan to upgrade from a Lenovo with a Ryzen 4800U (in combination with an old RME Fireface UC) and ordered a XMG Evo 14 (Ryzen 8845HS) and now just received an Asus Vivobook S14 (Ryzen AI HX 370). I ran Geekbench on both new machines and got a higher single core score for the HX 370, but a lower multi core score, nothing dramatic though (2880 (HX 370) vs 2620 (8845HS) in single core and something around 12000 (HX 370) vs 15000 i think (8845HS) in multicore).

Then I tried to run my current Ableton Live Set: 4 Drum Tracks and 4 Plugin- and Sampletracks, one Minilogue/Ext. HW track, plus mixbuses and returntracks. In general pluginheavy and not CPU-optimized (e.g. various Arturia Plugins, including Pigments, FX Fragments). My old Laptop (Ryzen 4800U) was ablet to run it at 44.1khz/512 samples without problems. The 8845HS can run it at 44.1khz/256 without problems, and at 128 samples with some random pops and cracks.

The new HX 370 is not able to run it at 44.1khz/2048 samples without cracks and pops... I tried going as low as 128 samples (as with Apple apparently lower samplerates force the CPU to use powercores only), but it only gets worse the lower the samplerate. I do use the high performance power plan in windows and the asus app. Else I did not do much optimizing yet and wonder if there might be something wrong or whether the CPU is really performing THAT bad?

One curious thing I noticed: with the HX 370 the CPU-meters in Ableton go crazy - even the averaged one jumps in steps of tens in fractions of seconds, and the current one goes up to 250 % all the time. Also, in the task manager, the CPU clock jumps between 1,5-2 GHZ but never goes up to its limits? (Running Geekbench it averages between 2.5-3.8 GHZ and goes up to 4.5 GHZ as well) As expected in windows ressource manager you can clearly see that cores 0-7 are mainly used, however some of the other cores (8-23) do get serious loads sometimes.

I might have some time over the weekend for trying out fixes/optimizations - so any ideas are welcome.


EDIT: LatencyMon is showing severe problems with dxkernel and other drivers - however I feel, that might only be an additional problem? As the audio issues directly relate to the current CPU-meter in Ableton and get worse with lower sample rates? Or would DPC-issues lead to similar symptoms?

EDIT 2: I am using Live 11 to test this. However I read that there have been no major updates in Live 12 on how efficiency cores are handled.

[Hokuspokus]

Hmm, I'd rather see it the other way round. DPC/ISR routines allocate CPU time. If there is a driver (e.g. dxgkrnl or Wdf01000) allocating a CPU core with a higher priority/none interruptable task, the CPU core is blocked for that time and cannot e.g. execute USB or audio driver tasks (on that core).
If the DPC/ISR execution time takes too long (and other requests cannot be served in time) the CPU core will overload (what you see in Ableton Live).

How long a DPC/ISR excution takes is not just depending on the CPU speed itself but also the driver, the peripheral HW, which interrupts lines they share, the Windows scheduler etc. I'd rather would search the issue there as the CPU itself surely is fast enough.

E.g. recently after a Windows update I also suddenly got a lot of audio drop outs (even with 2056 samples buffer size). LatencyMon showed high latencies induced by the Wdf01000.sys driver (several ms). After checking the device manager, I noticed that Windows added several new network devices. After deactivating those the latencies dropped noticable (to µs range) and the dropouts were gone.

But also, in the end this might not help as some drivers are essential or needed by the user. Also e.g. the HW interconnections (e.g. USB port <-> chipset) are fix. So, maybe just a future laptop driver or Windows update can help..

If you want to invest some time and know what you do: Here is a nice 1:15h youtube video which shows several steps to improve the low latency behavior of a system, going beyond the typical stuff like power plan editing (including in depth things like core parking). Second half is rather for advanced users as the changes can make the system unstable or damage/brick it (if e.g. wrong registry entries are edited)
URL Fix Latency for Good - In Depth Guide

[Hokuspokus]

Hi

and could you find ways to improve the performance on the devices with the new AMD CPUs?

Or anyone else with good or bad experience of those devices in conjunction with Ableton Live?

Need to get a new laptop as well and think about getting one with the new Ryzens.

[x3000]

I'm writing about laptops:

I would avoid a CPU with e-cores under Windows. You need single-core power and that several times over.
AMD CPUs such as 7840HS or 8845HS work very well and have sufficient reserves.

But ... Peripherals and drivers must fit. The latencies are the point! You can have a cutting-edge Windows computer with extreme computing power - but the latencies are catastrophic, which means that it can't be used as a DAW.

Low power consumption and neural processing units are of no interest at this point.

The XMG Evo will probably work very well as a DAW, provided you use a good audio interface: https://www.notebookcheck.net/Schenker- ... 522.0.html

[Hokuspokus]

...
But ... Peripherals and drivers must fit. The latencies are the point! You can have a cutting-edge Windows computer with extreme computing power - but the latencies are catastrophic, which means that it can't be used as a DAW.

Thanks for the reply!

Yeah, I know Especially on Windows devices that often is a bit of a lottery.. But also already had issues with Linux. There are just so many different HW and configuration possibilities where you already can get issues. And then yeah, the drivers and OS come in addition... That's indeed a point for the closed Apple ecosystem..

Thanks for the link! I see your point. Was also considering XMG Evo already. Though, the laptop for me is not just for DAW usage. Hence, I'm still searching a bit.

[x3000]

No, it's not a lottery.
You just have to do your research beforehand. In tests on notebookcheck.com, the DPC latency is usually measured, which is already a very meaningful information. Then it can become a self-runner.

If you order a new computer blind and want to make music with it: run latencymon and if the values are bad, the device will be sent back. What else should you do?

And, as already written, it needs single-core power and preferably many cores (performance cores). With AMD CPUs, it looks like the golden mean is now 8 performance cores. There are also laptops with AMD CPUs with 16 cores (HX), but the latency seems to be the main problem here.

Ableton Live does not need a dedicated graphics card, the internal one is sufficient. Here you have to be careful with the drivers - but this is not rocket science.

If you need more GPU power, use something with an NVidia GPU.

[Hokuspokus]

No, it's not a lottery.

Tell this my NI Traktor Audio 10 interface Does not run at all on my destop PC in none of the USB ports. And on my laptop it just runs on one USB port (but quite stable then). Else I get horrible crackling, nevermind the buffer size, deactivated drivers etc etc. In contrast to the Focusrite and RME interface which were/are connected to the PC and laptop and which run super smooth.

But good to know that notebookcheck.com do DPC latency tests! Will read laptop tests more carefully there next time. And agree that research helps.

[x3000]

Yes, audio interfaces are a very tricky business. I think most people just buy one and are lucky or don't realize they're unlucky.

The quality has to be right and driver support is even more important, otherwise you just have a worthless, and even worse, frustrating piece of junk.

You can guess where you can classify your NI interface. I don't know if NI still offers long driver support. Perhaps it has a technical defect. But it seems to be a case for the trash can.

RME is a good address here. I have also had very good experiences with MOTU. The interface should also be class compliant - just in case.

The problem with the technology is also the different interests of the manufacturer and the buyer. The manufacturer wants to earn money, and not just once, and the buyer wants to spend little money and then use the product until the end of its life, or at least for a long time. As a rule, this is not compatible.