Heavy DSP load on simple configuration (Pulsar 2)?

marvanni · Post by **marvanni** » Wed May 21, 2008 12:07 am

Hi,

I work on a AMD dual core 2.4 system with 4 g RAM. ( Win XP)
I use Cubase sx3 as my sequencer and for synth plugins.
My Yamaha An1X is used for controlling the Scope mixer and Cubase and its own sound plugged in the analog inputs from the Pulsar card (Scope 4.5).

I want the audio of the Cubase VST plugins routed to its own channel on the mixer in Scope, so I can use EQ and its build in insert effects.

I have setup effects on the auxilary ports, wich I thought is a normal way of using those effects, but look at the load of the DSP chips!!! ( I also tried other ASIO source modules, but als with heavy load on the DSP's.

XTC mode is switched off. ( SX3 seems not to recognize the Scope plugin's in my setup...)

Questions:

1: Is this a normal DSP load for such a simple an minimized configuration?

2. Is this the right way of using send effects in Scope?

And if the answer of question 1 is Yes: Why is the card so good? And is there a better way to achive what I want?

And if question 1 is No: What could be wrong?

I hope is is the right category to post this question...

(BTW : This screenshot is without Cubase even started)

katano · Post by **katano** » Wed May 21, 2008 12:22 am

at which samplerate are you working? 44.1khz?

cheers
Roman

marvanni · Post by **marvanni** » Wed May 21, 2008 12:44 am

RecS · Post by **RecS** » Wed May 21, 2008 2:11 am

STM 2448 !!!
On every channel of mixer is set and EQ & compressor
They do not read DSP while cords do not join to the channel of mixer!

You will look at the load of one mixer without connections!
And then connect devices by turns......

the19thbear · Post by **the19thbear** » Wed May 21, 2008 2:14 am

hmmm.. it looks like everything his connected right. Byt yes! that is way too much dsp consumation!
this would maybe happen with a 3 dsp card, but with a 6 dsp card? i dont think so.
I can't think of any reason why this should happen! a bad dsp chip maybe?

marvanni · Post by **marvanni** » Wed May 21, 2008 2:43 am

@RecS :

On every channel of mixer is set and EQ & compressor
They do not read DSP while cords do not join to the channel of mixer!

So you mean the maximum load of the mixer is displayed?

You will look at the load of one mixer without connections!
And then connect devices by turns......

I don't understand this ...

marvanni · Post by **marvanni** » Wed May 21, 2008 2:45 am

a bad dsp chip maybe?

Is there a way to test this?

Is it possible that someone with the same Pulsar 2 card copy the settings and compare the load oft the DSP?

bassdude · Post by **bassdude** » Wed May 21, 2008 1:52 pm

Try removing all inputs to the stm2448 and then add them one by one watching the dsp meter.

marvanni · Post by **marvanni** » Wed May 21, 2008 11:47 pm

I did.

The strange thing was:

On channel 8L and 8R the load increased a lot more then the other ASIO sources.

So I plugged 16 stereo (32) ASIO inputs on the mixer and it worked. Only still with heavy load, Bu as Soon as I used ASIO channel 8 the card overloaded again??

Thats seems very strange to me, since its no hardware port, with cables and contactpoints who can get dirty...

Post by **garyb** » Thu May 22, 2008 12:19 am

hmmm,
might as well try the shotgun fix. it usually works well for odd computer problems. run the installer again over the top of your current install(you can backup your Scope folder if you want to be extra safe). that should overwrite any damaged or corrupted program files without messing up your present user files and additional plugins.

marvanni · Post by **marvanni** » Thu May 22, 2008 2:07 am

OK, I will try it again.

Maybe I should consider a clean XP install...

Question:

In the samplerate settings there are 3 red leds, left from the adat/spdif selectrounds.

Should one of the 3 leds be lighted, to show the card is connected well?

chriskorff · Post by **chriskorff** » Thu May 22, 2008 2:16 am

Those little red lights just show that something is connected to the relevant ports — handy if you want to select an external device to slave to — but that shouldn't really have any bearing on your DSP load.

Cheers,

Chris

alfonso · Post by **alfonso** » Thu May 22, 2008 2:40 am

marvanni wrote:I did.

The strange thing was:

On channel 8L and 8R the load increased a lot more then the other ASIO sources.

So I plugged 16 stereo (32) ASIO inputs on the mixer and it worked. Only still with heavy load, Bu as Soon as I used ASIO channel 8 the card overloaded again??

Thats seems very strange to me, since its no hardware port, with cables and contactpoints who can get dirty...

Are you connecting the ASIO 8 source always to the same STM2448 inputs?
Is the load the same if you connect (and disconnect) each ASIO channel on the same channel in the mixer (say on mixers input 1L-1R)? What if you connect another ASIO channel to the same input you're using for ch 8? What if you skip that same input in the mixer?
What if you use another mixer, like the STM1632?

I would think of a dsp overload more related to a particular mixer input rather than a software connection. In that case maybe changing the mixer device file might solve the problem...try the things above to detect the cause..

astroman · Post by **astroman** » Thu May 22, 2008 6:06 am

that's a very simple project - I'd rather set up a copy from scratch to check the load.
Sometimes a Scope project gets messed internally, for whatever reasons - and you can't clean it up (whatever you try). The only way is trashing it and start from square one again.

cheers, Tom

Post by **garyb** » Thu May 22, 2008 8:48 am

thank you. you DO need both modules, regardless of whether they are connected to anything or not. they are the i/o jacks for your sequencer and the sequencer requires both...

marvanni · Post by **marvanni** » Thu May 22, 2008 11:05 am

At first: THANKS ALL.

For the fast response and the suggestions.

I did some research and find out that I had some shared IRQ's.
I changed Windows XP to not auto asign IRQ's and disabled some onboard network and USB connections. That seems to help.
Reinstalled the driver and Scope and tried new settings and rebuild the setups from scratch over again.

Switching ASIO cables on the mixer as suggested did not help ( not even my own suggested channel 8 load increase anymore) and it seems to me that loading the ASIO dest module does not take effect on the DSP load.

What did mattered, was the use of Masterverb Pro, the vocoder, master chorus and the SRB eq.

Those were to heavy for this setup.

I also tried the 1632 mixer. It takes less load, but then I have no compressor and eq at each track. Inserting a comp and eq on each channel results to a big DSP load as well.

I didn't installed windows from scratch. Maybe I should do that as well.

Below you can see a screenshot of my current setup, wich seems a lot better then the one I started this topic with.

16 stereo 16 bit asio source
4 send effects (enabled on almost every channel for testing)
Build in compressor and eq on almost every channel enabled and aplied.
44100 khz and latency on 32 ms.

The DSP's are loaded at maximum with this settings and I can't add anymore modules.

Question:
Is the setup below the most I can get from a Creamware Pulsar 2 card?
Or should I dig deeper to find out what is causing the big DSP load? ( since I still think the card can handle more than this

Thanks in advance!!

Post by **garyb** » Thu May 22, 2008 6:58 pm

for tracking, you don't need a lot of asio sources. just use cubase's mixer.

for mixing, you don't need a lot of asio destinations. use individual outputs or stem mixes into scope.

you may want to use other compressors or eqs on the channels. if so, disabling the built-in will save dsp. also, if you DON'T absolutely need those built-in eqs and compressors for the track you're working on, disable it(them) to save dsp.

you should be able to safely run 4ms @ 44.1khz....

you'll want another card, of course.....

basically, 16 eqs, 16 compressors, 32 asio i/o(asio connections are marked as stereo, but they can be used as two mono), reverb, delay, chorus, flanger and a big full-featured mixer is about what a project card can do. if it makes you feel better, if you were running all those devices of that quality on your cpu, you would NOT be able to run cubase at all.

marvanni · Post by **marvanni** » Mon May 26, 2008 1:21 am

Thanks,

Yes it makes me feel better

And I was aware it was already more then a normal CPU can handle.

I bought the card second hand and it took me some tweaks to config my pc correct for the card. I wanted to be shure I could get all of the card that it can handle. ( I started making mucis again after a few years of silence, but now with a decent setup to start with.

I could use turn some stereo inputs to mono and mix some drums in cubase before outputting it to Pulsar.

I will tweak some more to get more performance.

Do I need as much asio destinations as I have sources, or will just 2 destinations do the job? In fact I don't use them at all...

Post by **garyb** » Mon May 26, 2008 1:57 am

no, asio can be different numbers of inputs and outputs. see my earlier post...

borg · Post by **borg** » Mon May 26, 2008 10:36 am

You can set the number of channels in the pop-up window that appears when double clicking the ASIO source.