I've been using FL 9 on a Quadcore system with 4 gigs of ram. I haven't done any sort of benchmarks on actively monitoring performance increase. All I know is, opening FL with the Extended Memory .exe allows the full use of my RAM to take effect, and the multi process thread is enabled. I haven't had any issues with speed whatsoever. Everything runs completely smoothly, with many vst's open at once.

Through my experience, the main ceiling I would ever hit in the past was RAM, not the processor itself, so I think you'll be more than set with 8 gigs DDR3 and 6 core, even if FL doesn't utilize all 6 just yet.

Definitely makes me appreciate what I have now, remembering the days of 512mb ram and shitty single core processor, where even loading up the simplest of VST's resulted in 1-2 minute load times.

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Last edited by Tapanojum on Nov-27-2010 at 03:35

quote:

Originally posted by DJ Robby Rox I'm also isolating FL on this new desktop, so NO OTHER PROGRAMS will be on it at all. I don't even want anti-virus or internet, no msword, no nothing but Fruity and what ever is required with the windows 7 install.

That seems a bit harsh, no? I run Ableton on the computer that I use for everything else (video games, internet, etc.) and it runs perfectly fine. And i built the computer in 2006.

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Interesting question, especially for the 6 core thing. As far as I know, FL didn't had any proper multi-core processing until version 9 and I do believe from there you could easily apply a huge step forward in performance with anything like a dual / quad core.

6 cores can't be that bad but you're right in asking yourself if FL will use them proper, which also lead to the question which hosts would support something like a 6 core to full advantage. Cubase for example had an improvement in performance for the latest 5.5 update regarding quad cores and higher.

I'm still on your crappy set up (dual core / 2 GB RAM) and I never really had issues, but I also do have an eye on getting more efficient instruments and effects.

I actually did some benchmarks, like 60 instruments all playing the same polyphonic sequence, with some EQ and compressor on each channel and all I can say is that I'm not having any problems with my main tools, which are Predator, impOSCar and Kontakt. And there is still freeze, increasing buffer size, use less polyphony for an instrument, reduce oversampling or just simply change the instrument to the one you desire when rendering, and use something else as a "notepad" as long as you are in the creative process.

Frankly, you'd probably get a pretty good answer from Image-Line themselves. They're usually pretty good about answering fan questions.

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You made a mistake imo, you should have gone with Intel's i5 760 + good cooling, 1333mhz value memory sticks (bcz the chip's mem controller woks @1333) and then spend the money on the quickest most reasonably priced SSD you could find.

I've seen the Nehalm cores beat AMD's current cores in SONAR+Nuendo benchmarks.

i'm waiting for the I5-2500 which should be released on the 5th of January at about 205$ and be as fast as the Core i7 980X .

i'm using fl studio 8 and a quad core cpu and i can tell you that only uses 1 core at 100%, possibly 2 seeing the perfomance isn't that bad, but i'm sure it's not using the 4 cores, however 2 cores can be working on fl studio and the other 2 in windows processes and so.

If 9 has better core support i think i'm going to update lol, i hope projects will keep on the hd.

Btw, since when 6 core cpus exist?

So, I take it that my picking up an 8 Core Mac Pro yesterday was a total overkill or is Ableton capable of leveraging all those cores?

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I'm under the impression that either a program is multithread enabled or it isn't? Whether the chip has 2, 4, 6 cores doesn't matter, the operating system controls which instructions go to which core.

It may be possible (I have no idea) to write a program which limits itself to two cores, but I don't know why programmers would go to extra effort to cripple their programs.

quote:

Originally posted by floyd741 That seems a bit harsh, no? I run Ableton on the computer that I use for everything else (video games, internet, etc.) and it runs perfectly fine. And i built the computer in 2006.

If I could afford 2 PCs I'd do the same as the OP. Not only for the minimal speed increase you might get with nothing else installed/running in the background, but because when you sit down at that machine you get shit done! No internet, no mp3, etc... to steal your focus.

quote:

Originally posted by derail I'm under the impression that either a program is multithread enabled or it isn't? Whether the chip has 2, 4, 6 cores doesn't matter, the operating system controls which instructions go to which core. It may be possible (I have no idea) to write a program which limits itself to two cores, but I don't know why programmers would go to extra effort to cripple their programs.

I think you might have it a bit backwards with that last sentence about programmers exhausting extra effort to criple their programs. Programming software to support 2 cores I was told my a tech buff is relatively difficult enough, but writing the code to support 4 or even 6 is a lot harder.
So companies like FL will release a version claiming it to be "multicore compliant" when in fact the program won't properly use more than just 2 cores. Right now I know for a fact my version 9 uses 2 cores exactly how it should, I just want to make sure the code was written well enough to handle 6.
Either way guess I'll find out when everything comes.

quote:

Originally posted by DJ Robby Rox I think you might have it a bit backwards with that last sentence about programmers exhausting extra effort to criple their programs. Programming software to support 2 cores I was told my a tech buff is relatively difficult enough, but writing the code to support 4 or even 6 is a lot harder.

Yes and no. To clarify on this point, when you talk about multiple cores, you are really referring to how many threads can run concurrently at any given moment.

Single core processors can actually only operate on one work unit at a time, but because of lightning fast task switching and scheduling, it can appear to perform many actions at the same time, even though the processor is only doing one thing at a time.

The ability to support multiple cores really boils down to the specific type of processing task you are trying to accomplish and how much that task lends itself to being parallelized in the first place, regardless of how many cores (or threads) you are dealing with.

So in one sense, yes, you are correct in the statement that coding for 2 cores is difficult enough, and coding for 4 and 6 is even more difficult, but only because the process of synchronization has always been done manually. Obviously its easier to synchronize two threads rather than 4 or 6. Anyone who has done any type of multi-threaded software development can attest to the giant PITA it can be (especially debugging).

However, updates and newer languages are now providing built in mechanisms to make this process of synchronization much, much easier. For example, .NET 4.0 includes many new libraries for dealing with parallel tasks, and even provides several thread safe collection types (a notoriously difficult object type when dealing with parallelization).

As this relates for DAW software, the ability to run on multiple cores (threads) boils down to the approach used to take advantage of a multi-core setup. In most DAW packages (Logic in particular), one technique is to assign each audio/instrument channel to a single core (thread). While this creates the advantage of making the application more multi-core aware, the disadvantage to this approach is that if you overload a channel with 6 or 7 plugins, then all that processing on that channel is still assigned to a single core. You can actually gain a performance advantage by routing that channel to a AUX bus and moving 3 or 4 of those plugins to that bus. This way each channel only has 3 or 4 plugins on it at one time and the processing of those channels can be assigned to separate cores. Is this true "multi-core" support or is this just what one might call "multi-core compliant"? Ask 10 different developers and you'll get 10 different answers.

There are other techniques use in DAW software packages that also take advantage of multi core setups, but describing those is well beyond the scope of this forum.

I believe FL is written in Python, which is a another relative newcomer to the multi-core game, at least as far as providing developers an easy way to make their applications take advantage of multi-core processors. Since the original design of FL likely did not take in to account multi-core setups (and why would they have back then), design decisions were probably made that makes it a bit difficult to just "add" multi-core support without major re-design. So the next best thing is to parallelize what you can and slowly redesign key features over a period of time to make the application more and more capable of taking "full" advantage of multi-core processors. Logic has gone through this transformation recently starting with Logic 8 and really only now at version 9.1.3 has it seemed to finally come to fully support and fully utilize multi-core processors. Logic 8 was notorious for making uneven use of multi-core processors (1 would be at 100%, while the others might only be at 20 or 20%).

Every major software package has had to go through this process, the only difference is that some companies have more money and people to throw at the problem, so they get it done faster. FL will get there eventually, they just might not have as many resources to throw at the problem as someone like, say, Apple.

Last edited by Eric J on Nov-28-2010 at 06:21