crackles related to graphics

King of Snake · Post by **King of Snake** » Fri Apr 21, 2006 2:55 am

Lately I've been noticing some crackling in the cubase SL 2 audio engine when certain graphical things happen like switching between programmmes. I can't be sure but i think it may have started when i added a third CW card to my system. I have ACPI turned on and the cards have their own irq's (although two cards share the same one) but it really seems like there's still some conflict with the graphics card. Is it possible for irq conflicts to exist even though cards are seemingly on their own irq's?

Guess I'll have to try some switching around with the cards to see if it helps...

Shroomz~> · Post by **Shroomz~>** » Fri Apr 21, 2006 6:59 am

Hi, if you've still got the A7N8X we've had similar problems before ourselves. We use an Nvidea FX5200 (8x AGP, 128mB) Previously (until spring/summer last year), our Scope system was getting used for all sorts of crap that it shouldn't have. We had the built-in dual network adaptors both running (one for the net, one for local use) a scsi card installed running a fast scsi drive etc & the list goes on

Then I kinda took a mad turn after we decided to isolate the DAW & just literally went to town on optimizing the system, starting in the bios. By switching off (in the bios) the Network adaptors & lots of other stuff we didn't need for a strict DAW, it not only sorted the IRQ sharing problems we somehow couldn't seem to get around, but also put an end to most of the seemingly graphics related crackles or interference we previously had. The system is now using a lot less IRQ's in total, which presumably helps XP to be a happy chappy. At the moment our 3 DSP boards are in slots 1, 3 & 4, using IRQ's 7, 5 & 10 & we don't have these problems an more.

Shroomz~> · Post by **Shroomz~>** » Fri Apr 21, 2006 7:05 am

Oh, I meant to say. If you start switching off motherboard hardware like networking, midi, game port crap etc etc etc in the bios, I'd imagine you'll need to do a reinstall of XP to reep the benefits.

It's hard to tell people they must do this or must do that, but I've recently (just last year) realised that NOT having your DAW on the net is essentially a must.

King of Snake · Post by **King of Snake** » Fri Apr 21, 2006 8:52 am

I upgraded recently to a Gigabyte GA-K8NSC and Athlon 64 setup. The first thing i do is disable unneccesary stuff in the BIOS and all the regular tweaks. Unfortunately i do not have the option of having a seperate pc for audio use so it does have internet and stuff, but any problems i ever had never were related to this, as i do keep my machine pretty clean and tweaked anyway.

my irq's look like this:

as you can see the CW boards are on irq 17 and 18 (it does say "shared" though...anyone know why that is?).
Physically they are in slots 1, 4 and 5.
The manual for this mobo doesn't specify the irq sharing of the slots sadly...

King of Snake · Post by **King of Snake** » Fri Apr 21, 2006 9:15 am

strangly enough i hear crackles only with certain applications. I crackles when i open or close (or minimize/maximize) windows taskmanager, or the ati control center, but not with internet browsers, or the cubase screen moving (which is something i'd expect if there was a problem with the graphics card)

Shroomz~> · Post by **Shroomz~>** » Fri Apr 21, 2006 9:26 am

You're not gonna be opening task manager or ATI control center during recording are you? Doesn't sound like much of a problem unless it's an app that you need to open & close while recording.

King of Snake · Post by **King of Snake** » Fri Apr 21, 2006 12:24 pm

true

it does happen sometimes with just minimizing cubase though, or other stuff, and I believe it wasn't there at all some time ago, so i still feel there's something not quite right.

King of Snake · Post by **King of Snake** » Fri Apr 21, 2006 12:55 pm

Did some more testing, playing back an audio file in wavelab. While using the wav drivers, there's no problems at all, even with the taskmanager or ati control panel, which give crackles with the asio driver. Strange...

*update*
more testing, there's definitely a bit more going on that i initially thought and it definitely seems graphics related. Playing a track that uses the Shortcircuit VST sampler running a rex drumloop which graphically lights up the sample slices as they place, it's definitely crackling. When I close the sampler gui, the crackle dissapears.

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<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: King of Snake on 2006-04-21 14:34 ]</font>

Shroomz~> · Post by **Shroomz~>** » Fri Apr 21, 2006 1:41 pm

Well it's like this:- we give you a load more 'off the wall' 'pulled from nowhere' possible options.... or you simply try another graphics card

King of Snake · Post by **King of Snake** » Fri Apr 21, 2006 1:57 pm

Well, it has worked properly before so I don't think it's the graphics card itself that is at fault...

Shroomz~> · Post by **Shroomz~>** » Fri Apr 21, 2006 2:55 pm

Good point. Is it?

valis · Post by **valis** » Fri Apr 21, 2006 3:01 pm

Cubase users have occasionally reported having to fiddle with their graphics card accelleration settings....

King of Snake · Post by **King of Snake** » Sat Apr 22, 2006 12:29 am

Yeah i'm running Cubase 2.2. And i have been fiddling with my graphics card, like turning off PCI/AGP read/write, and changing the acceleration settings but that didn't really make much of a difference (except make my graphics unusably slow).

*update*
i removed the 3rd card (pulsar 2) so now i only have Powersampler and Pulsar I in slots 1 and 5, sharing irq 18. This seems to improve matters quite a bit. The crackling with the sampler plugin is gone, and the other crackles are lessened considerably although not gone completely...

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<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: King of Snake on 2006-04-22 01:42 ]</font>

valis · Post by **valis** » Sat Apr 22, 2006 2:46 am

Have you tried poking around to see what the pci latency of your ati gfxcard is set to? I've noticed that ati likes to set its drivers to a latency of 255. Also, you might try sticking the Pulsar2 in place of the Pulsar1 and seeing if your results are still good.

symbiote · Post by **symbiote** » Sat Apr 22, 2006 3:15 am

something else you can try is lowering the hardware acceleration for the video card. that fixes the graphics-crackling issue sometimes for some reason.

Shroomz~> · Post by **Shroomz~>** » Sat Apr 22, 2006 4:59 am

as you can see the CW boards are on irq 17 and 18 (it does say "shared" though...anyone know why that is?).

Just taking a stab in the dark here, but I think the 'exclusive' irq allocations are running on the ISA buss, while all of the 'shared' ones are running on the PCI buss.

Also, how much ram is on the ATI card?

Shroomz~> · Post by **Shroomz~>** » Sat Apr 22, 2006 5:07 am

No ISA slot on the board right enough, so an ISA buss is probably not present

Must be a different exclusive buss on those newer boards. On our NF2 board those allocations are running on the ISA buss.

King of Snake · Post by **King of Snake** » Tue Apr 25, 2006 1:34 am

I'm waiting for a new harddrive to arrive and then i'll do a new windows installation, see where that leads.

Shroomz~> · Post by **Shroomz~>** » Tue Apr 25, 2006 2:45 am

I'd maybe have tried another graphics card first, but a new HD & fresh install is always good once in a while

valis · Post by **valis** » Tue Apr 25, 2006 9:37 pm

On 2006-04-22 06:07, Shroomz wrote:
No ISA slot on the board right enough, so an ISA buss is probably not present
Must be a different exclusive buss on those newer boards. On our NF2 board those allocations are running on the ISA buss.

Actually any ps/2 mouse/keyboard, parallel port and/or serial port would technically be on the 'ISA' bus. This is built into the PCI chipset and transparent, but the ISA bus is technically still there. I don't think that has anything to do with 'exclusive' in that irq list though, especially since IDE controllers definately don't need 16bit ISA suppport...