Rain Recording

Vista Performance Tests

By Robin Vincent

January 2009

It's been a year since we published our performance comparison between Windows Vista and XP. We've shown that performance is not really the issue when deciding on the OS but rather what your software and hardware needs to run at its optimum. Over the coming year Windows XP Professional will become more and more scarce and so until the release of Windows 7 in 2010 Vista may become the standard OS for all new computers. Our testing of Vista 64 demonstrates that this is nothing to fear and in fact the 64bit version of Vista unlocks performance potential not realised by XP Professional in its ability to address more than 4GB of RAM and higher resolution when coupled with a 64bit application such as Cakewalk Sonar 8.

It's time to shift our focus to comparing new technology rather than operating systems. If you'd like to see our original Vista/XP comparison testing then click here...

To kick off 2009 we'd like to introduce Intels new Core i7 technology and show how well it compares to the regular Intel Quad Core. At the time of writing the Core i7 is aimed at the high-end performance market and so comes with a premium but hopefully this will demonstrate the enormous power at our fingertips. The Core i7 also comes with Rain's first foray into the area of overclocking. This is usually seen as the home of hardware geeks and gamers trying to wring out every last drop of CPU power, normally at the expense of quietness and stability but Intel's new technology makes overclocking much simpler and within the grasp of a mainstream desktop machine without the unpleasant side effects. Through extensive testing we've found that a gentle hardware overclock is possible without compromising the system in any way. Further overclocking is also possible via software for those moments when your projects are bursting at the seams and just need that little bit extra. Our performance tests will demonstrate the advantages of our overclocking.

In time we'll add further computers to this performance comparison but let's start here:

The Systems

All systems running Vista 64 Ultimate.

Music Software and Hardware

• The test software is the 64bit version of Cubase 4.52
• The audio interface used does vary from system to system but in each case the target latency is 10ms

The Tests

Most benchmarking software used to test computers seems to produce results that don't bare any relation to anything you are actually likely to do. Knowing how many bits of data a system can process in any given second is largely unhelpful in an audio context. What we want to know is how many plug-ins or virtual instruments a system can run and then play music through them without glitching. So that's what we did.

Plug-ins

• We start with a 32 track project of 24bit 96kHz audio and add a multiband compressor and a Roomworks reverb to the master bus.
• Next we add 4 bands of EQ onto each track and then add another plug-in, one at a time, one track at a time until the audio begins to glitch.
• If we can load 32 of the new plug-in then we start adding another to each track and so on in the same way.
• Once glitching occurs we remove plug-ins until stable playback is maintained, add up all the plug-ins and that gives us our number.

Here are the plug-ins we used:

• Channel EQ
• Dynamics Compressor - Ballad Piano
• Stereo Chorus - Background Vocal
• Mod Machine - Dance Vocal
• Rotary - Rockrotary
• Maximizer - Remastered
• Pingpong Delay - Shuffle
• Roomworks SE - Bright Plate

Polyphony - Spector

Rarely would you find a piece of music that has every instrument playing at the same time, however for the purposes of measuring polyphony that's what we had to do. Rather than measuring from a single instrument we restricted each instance of the Spector VSTi to 8 notes and then added another instance. A separate MIDI track was created for each instance and a sequence of 8 notes were played and held for a number of bars to ensure stable playback over time. Once glitching occurs a few notes were muted until stable playback was achieved giving our instance and polyphony count.

Each instance was loaded with "Ana Strings" and set to 8 voices.

Polyphony - HalionOne

A slightly different polyphony test this time using a sample based instrument. The test was the same but the polyphony of each instance varied depending on the loaded instrument - the number of voices per instrument varied from 8 - 32. Each instance was loaded up with a different instrument and we're up to 56 instances now. If you'd like a full list of what instruments we used then please contact us.

The Results

Plug-ins

Click to enlarge

Different plug-ins vary in the amount of load they put on the system. Some are very simple and you can loads before the CPU breaks a sweat, whereas others are decidedly more intense. You can see this by the small differences between the first four systems. From plug-in number 224-256 we were adding Roomworks reverbs, probably the most CPU intensive plug-in in Cubase. The Core i7 940 overclocked to 3.6GHz actually broke the plug-in ceiling for a 32 track project - every single slot was filled and so we had to create a new audio track alongside and start adding plug-ins to that, so it's actually a 33 track project. We're going to have to come up with some new tests!

Polyphony - Spector

Click to enlarge

Polyphony - HalionOne

Click to enlarge

Conclusions

We are constantly amazed at how the technology, generation after generation, manages to bring such performance leaps. This time last year the QX6850 3GHz CPU running on the DP35DP was our top system whereas our new Core i7 system can achieve over double the performance in some tests.

The results show that although CPU speed will always be important it's not the only factor in determining the performance of a system. System 1, the QX6850, actually has the fastest native CPU cycle speed at 3GHz and yet is surpassed by the later generations running at slower speeds. The CPU within each generation then directly controls the performance of the system. The Halion tests which tax a greater amount of the system as a whole show how much the overall Core i7 technology is when compared to the earlier generations - the leap in performance is quite marked. This will be down to the better memory management now that the controller is built into the CPU and other enhancements to the flow of data around the motherboard. With the overclocking it's interesting to see how the 920 overclocked to 3GHz gives more or less the same performance as the 940 running at its native 2.93GHz. But then when it's further overclocked in software to 3.3GHz it doesn't quite perform as well as the hardware overclocked 940 at 3.3GHz. It is possible to overclock these systems further than we have in hardware but it becomes very complex and introduces stability and cooling issues that you don't really want in an audio workstation.

This isn't the top of the heap, there's a 960 3.3GHz processor available and more will no doubt follow. There are also some new and exciting offerings from AMD scheduled for this year which we hope to add to this comparison. These results should only be taken as a guide to what's possible and will vary depending on the audio interface, buffer sizes used, software and your working environment, but it's plain to see that with a Rain Element Core i7 you are buying into an immense resource of power backed up by Rain's expertise and support for music and media applications.

Robin Vincent

Robin Vincent is CTO of Rain Computers, Inc, President of Rain Recording UK and author of music technology books PC Music - The Easy Guide and The Guitarists Guide to Computer Music.

Vista - Put to the test.

The Test Systems

System 1:

• Intel DP35DP motherboard
• QX6850 Quad Extreme 3GHz Processor
• 4GB DDR2

System 2:

• Intel DP45SG motherboard
• Q9550 Quad 2.83GHz Processor
• 4GB DDR3

System 3:

• MSI X58 Platinum motherboard
• Intel Core i7 920 2.66GHz
• 3GB DDR3

System 4:

• MSI X58 Platinum motherboard
• Intel Core i7 940 2.93GHz
• 3GB DDR3

Have a question about Vista?

Contact Rain with any questions you have on compatibilty of Rain computers and third party gear.