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-- is vista ready?
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is vista ready?

i want to upgrade, but is it safe?

depends what you need to do. but i would say no.

For audio production?

I would hold out until at least the end of the year.

it depends on the drivers..

nice benchmark here: http://rainrecording.co.uk/vista/performance
(but imho too good to be true)

5 Things I can see that need to be ready before I'll upgrade:

• Vista Service Pack 1. I never touch a new Windows OS until at least 1 service pack is out.
  
• Support for my sequencer package, Cubase in my case.
  
• Drivers for my audio interface that are greater then version 1.0
  
• Drivers for my MIDI interface that are greater then version 1.0
  
• Support from Universal Audio for my UAD-1 card.
  

oh ninja i know you know me, mankind is hopeless...so yes, upgrade.

I'm not touching it anytime soon, because most likely not all music software & hardware I use is Vista compatible. Besides, why fix something that isn't broken; I have all nicely set up and working. The possible performance benefits don't weigh enough in the balance; Win 2K with dualcore is fast enough for now.

Even more trouble could (well, probably would, knowing Microsoft) emerge from general compatibility issues.

I think a better question to ask yourself is: is there something specific you want that's offered in Windows Vista but not in Windows XP?

Upgrading your operating system is a major change. It's always going to break something, it's just a matter of what and how badly. (For the Linux/Mac fanboys - put a sock in it, because Microsoft is the only company that even *tries* to maintain compatibility).

Vista definitely won't perform better than XP. Unless you turn off Windows Defender and all the useless security shit, it will actually perform much worse. Disable all the cruft and it's basically on par.

all i want is for it to be on par, and all my vsts still work.

quote:

Originally posted by mysticalninja all i want is for it to be on par, and all my vsts still work.

^ huh? then wtf is the point in upgrading? you'd risk everthing crashing to have exactly what you have now?

Just a question

How much better will the 64 bits CPU`s perform on Vista, if ur using 64 bit applications ?

quote:

Originally posted by djbruuen ^ huh? then wtf is the point in upgrading? you'd risk everthing crashing to have exactly what you have now?

its sexeh

quote:

Originally posted by Subtle Just a question How much better will the 64 bits CPU`s perform on Vista, if ur using 64 bit applications ?

Well according to that link thecYrus posted, the 64 version makes no difference

quote:

Originally posted by aquila Well according to that link thecYrus posted, the 64 version makes no difference

Nice new technology.

Errr, Vista makes a difference if you actually get the 64-bit Vista. Obviously with the 32-bit Vista it won't make any difference.

There's also a Windows XP x64 but if you want to go the x64 route then I actually would recommend Vista, because the XP x64 was kind of a half-baked update to a product release 5 years before, while 64-bit support has been integrated into Vista right from the start.

Vendor and driver support still kind of sucks for x64 though.

Yes Digi, thats what i though.

But how much increase in performance can we expect when going strictly 64 bit?

Assuming you had a 64-bit OS, with 64-bit drivers for all hardware, and applications compiled for x64 and designed to take proper advantage of it, you could probably expect a 30-40% performance boost.

Without application support, but with driver support, maybe 20% tops unless it's a really graphics-intensive application or something.

Without driver support... not much.

One other thing to keep in mind is that a 32-bit architecture limits you to 4 GB of address space (practically less than 3 GB of available RAM most of the time), and this can't be overcome without complicated and gross hacks like PAE. We're pushing the 4 GB mark already as most people have 2 GB now, so that will be an issue soon, solved on 64-bit OSes.

xp sp2 supports 4gb right?

my friend has vista. i just utterly hate it. xp the way to go everyone. just the interface itself makes me sick. it doesn't really look user friendly, not as much as xp. either it sucks or it could be that i hate changing from one operating system to another.

quote:

xp sp2 supports 4gb right?

This is true, however you have to understand what that truly means to the Windows OS.

Memory in Windows is split up in whats called 2 "modes". There is kernel mode and there is user mode. Both these modes run at the same time. Kernel mode is where all the code that communicates with the hardware resides, and user mode is where all the code that you use (read, applications) resides. One of the reasons for this is so that if there is a hardware failure, there is less chance of that failure taking down the whole system, and Windows can recover gracefully instead of the old BSOD that used to haunt us during the 95/98 days.

The 64 bit OS will increase the amount of memory addressable in these modes. Traditionally, Windows is set up to use 2GB of memory in kernel mode and 2GB in user mode, so one application can only address a maximum of 2GB of memory at any one time. It is possible to change this to use 3GB in user mode and 1GB in kernel mode using the BOOT.INI trick, but this is not recommended, especially for a DAW as it can compromise the speed in which Windows can communicate with the hardware.

quote:

Originally posted by Eric J Memory in Windows is split up in whats called 2 "modes". There is kernel mode and there is user mode. Both these modes run at the same time. Kernel mode is where all the code that communicates with the hardware resides, and user mode is where all the code that you use (read, applications) resides.

Further to that, the 4 GB is 4 GB of address space. That is not the same thing as memory. Are you running a video card with 512 MB of video memory? Well, that needs to be addressable on a user-mode display driver so now you only have 3.5 GB of address space left for memory.

It's not just video cards, of course - there are several devices in your system that take up address space. Some of them may reside in the kernel address space but many do not. In practice you're not likely to see more than 3 GB of addressable physical memory on Windows XP without PAE.

64-bit Windows extends the user-mode address space to 8 TB. Should be plenty enough for a decade or so. Of course, applications still need to be compiled with the appropriate switches to be able to address that much better - if they're not, they're stuck with the same old 4 GB.

quote:

Originally posted by akadama888 my friend has vista. i just utterly hate it. xp the way to go everyone. just the interface itself makes me sick. it doesn't really look user friendly, not as much as xp. either it sucks or it could be that i hate changing from one operating system to another.

I was playing around with Vista at Best Buy. To me it was a hole step up in looks and user compatibility.

Vista comes with mahjong! SOLD.

quote:

Originally posted by DigiNut Assuming you had a 64-bit OS, with 64-bit drivers for all hardware, and applications compiled for x64 and designed to take proper advantage of it, you could probably expect a 30-40% performance boost. Without application support, but with driver support, maybe 20% tops unless it's a really graphics-intensive application or something. Without driver support... not much. One other thing to keep in mind is that a 32-bit architecture limits you to 4 GB of address space (practically less than 3 GB of available RAM most of the time), and this can't be overcome without complicated and gross hacks like PAE. We're pushing the 4 GB mark already as most people have 2 GB now, so that will be an issue soon, solved on 64-bit OSes.

I think currently there is only 1 native 64-bit DAW app. Sonar Producer edition. But even then it has some "Bit-Bridge" technology that handles conversion of 32 bit vst's (all of them).

I guess once you get the midi to audio you would notice a definite improvement. Plus all the Midi and Audio effect are Native 64-bit in Sonar 64-bit edition!

A good read here!!! The State of 64-Bit Computing in the Music Products Industry

Cubase has supported 64-bit Windows for a long time now. Vista 64-bit support isn't quite there yet for Cubase, but neither is Vista 32-bit support.

I don't know what you're talking about with this "midi to audio" business; that basically makes no sense. Some sequencers MIGHT move from single-precision to double-precision floating-point for representing audio internally, but even if they do, that won't improve performance and I seriously doubt that it will make any noticeable difference in sound quality since 32-bit FP already has virtually zero noise.

The Wave 64 format (.w64) has been around for a while now but I've never seen anybody use it, not even the mastering shops. They all seem pretty content with plain old 16 bits, and for recording you're still limited to 24 bits (fixed-point) in any case.

One of the main advantages of 64-bit architecture, other than the increased address space, is the fact that double-precision floating point numbers can be represented in a single register. For apps that do a lot of FP math, they use doubles anyway, and it's currently a lot of extra work for the CPU that can be significantly reduced by x64. Most audio apps like Cubase only use singles anyway, so you won't see any improved performance at all when switching to x64.

You *may* see improved performance on certain VSTs, if those VSTs use doubles internally. SIR is one that comes to mind, it performs so brutally that I can only imagine it uses high-precision math to do those convolutions and an x64-compiled version would probably be a lot faster. For simple VSTs like a flanger, I doubt it.

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