RME ASIO performance is down (again)...

[Guest]

Hi Ableton,

as I've reported a few times since the first release of Live 1.01 up to all 1.5betas, there's a huge performance drain when using RME hammerfall or hammerfall DSP cards as ASIO devivce on a Mac. Especially when performance of the application is compared to mac Soundmanager or many other ASIO drivers.

LIVE allways eats up 7-8% more CPU (btw. CPUusage was overall less in 1.5beta1) on my machine if using RME drivers, compred to any other ASIO driver I've tried (Digidesign 001, Audiowerk8, Motu828) which usually all ask for 3-4 % if live is started (RME shows 11% usage if started).

It's a real shame that this 'RME vs LIVE ASIO' issue is so long reported (over 5 months now)and still no real fix is introduced - in general the RME hardware is showing a very good ASIO performance in any other ASIOhost I've seen - so obviously Ableton has introduced a ASIO implementation in LIVE that isn't working fully compatible with the ASIO spec. !!!

please comment....

cheers,

[Guest]

Ok,

I've now calm down a little on this RME Hammerfall CPU drain issue - cause I've figured out that if deactivating unnescessary inputs and outputs in Audio settings, the CPU performance usage reduces to a acceptable value.

So I guess this is because of the LIVEs design feature to record inputs instantly/immediately - where some other ASIO hosts handle this slightly different (little more complex) and this is one of the features I respect LIVE for.....bummer

Looks like Ableton has choosen the way to handle a ASIO device with keeping all I/O ports active all time, so the more I/O ports you have on your asio device (think of three cascaded hammerfalls !!!) the more CPU it uses on start to keep all ports active - unfortunately that's the same pitfall Apple introduced in current OS X Audio Core concept and therefore we haven't seen any released OS X drivers for allmost every multi I/O audio interfaces around (Digi, RME, Motu, etc.).
I know Apple is working on changes on this issue because of heavy demand from the different hardware vendors...lets hope they all work it out cool for the end user.....

cheers,

[random]

dude...thanks for posting. I was wondering why I was showing less performance with the Hammerfall DSP /multiface. I was ready to just use soundmanager instead, but now I know why.

thanks for the post.

cheers.