# New DAW benchmarks from Scan are out



## funnybear (Feb 28, 2020)

Pete Kaine from Scan just posted updated DAW benchmarks comparing AMD vs Intel more fully:

link: DAW benchmarks

I am just building my new Threadripper 3970x PC and will report back with some benchmarks of my own soon.


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## paaltio (Feb 29, 2020)

Really curious to hear your 3970X results! It's a shame they weren't included in the charts there (I assume because the 64/128 latencies didn't work so well?). Would still love to know how it works for larger buffers compared to the other CPUs.


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## Julian Prieto (Feb 29, 2020)

I wonder if the shortcomings of the 3970X translate also to the 3960X too, been seriously considering building a TRX40 system soon.


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## ProfoundSilence (Feb 29, 2020)

dang, the 10980xe had a pretty massive lead starting 128 up. thread ripper tried to catch up at 512(which is pretty painful for a buffer) but either way, it's insane. even at 128, thread ripper is almost twice the polyphony of a 9900k, and the 10980xe is almost 3 times the 9900k.

Here I am with a 5960x, a beast of a it's time(although I can still get mine to 4.9ghz effortlessly) And if it were on that chart it would get absolutely SHAMED. 

So glad I'm like 3-4 years away from considering a new build. I'll probably wait until something like DDR5 comes out and DDR4 is dirt cheap for big sticks.


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## paaltio (Feb 29, 2020)

ProfoundSilence said:


> dang, the 10980xe had a pretty massive lead starting 128 up. thread ripper tried to catch up at 512(which is pretty painful for a buffer) but either way, it's insane. even at 128, thread ripper is almost twice the polyphony of a 9900k, and the 10980xe is almost 3 times the 9900k.



Which results are you looking at, is it this chart in the above link? Because as far as I can tell there are no Threadripper CPUs in there.

That's what confused me so much -- the text itself mentioned the 3970X, but then the chart only has the Ryzen 9 3950X...

In terms of pure performance it should absolutely rule in these benchmarks with a high enough buffer setting, but it'd be really good to know how high it needs to be. Or the 3990X for that matter. But that has a fairly low base clock, so I feel like it won't work for audio work as well, even if you use VE Pro to get more threads going than your sequencer likely will be able to.

Really hard to gauge how these will end up transferring to one's own workflow with the hybrid buffer systems in all DAWs basically now. But I guess a good rule of thumb for hybrid buffers is to imagine how much polyphony you'll have on a single Kontakt instance at a maximum (which will all run without the extra buffer when one MIDI input track is record armed), and then make sure you're not too close to that? Haven't done a lot of testing how they scale though, so maybe someone knows better.


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## Architekton (Feb 29, 2020)

Intel really doesnt cut it these days performance and price wise, so if you are going for a new machine get r9 3900/3950x or wait for 4900 which will most probably come out late autumn this year.


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## ProfoundSilence (Feb 29, 2020)

honestly I havent looked at cpus since the zen debut because I'm not building anything. Everyone I know who's asked me to build a pc has not needed an upgrade in years. 

And that said, I havent kept up with the nomenclature so I just assumed it was thread ripper.


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## chimuelo (Feb 29, 2020)

Architekton said:


> Intel really doesnt cut it these days performance and price wise, so if you are going for a new machine get r9 3900/3950x or wait for 4900 which will most probably come out late autumn this year.



Wise words.
AMD Ryzens are certainly exciting, but Zen 3 will be everything the Matisse CPUs weren’t.

Just 2 years ago all live performers I worked around had Macs and PC’s with Intel i7’s.
Now I’m the only guy using old Haswell builds, and everyone else has 3700/3800X rigs.
One guy bought the big 3950X and said it sucked but could load tons of synths and samplers. Popping in a 3800X was all the difference in the world.
Most live cats use 64 and 128 live.
I don’t need that because I’m using more hardware than software, so 256 @ 6 msec. works fine for me.

Looking forward to an 8 core Ryzen 3 with 8 cores and 65 watts.
That would be a great upgrade. 
Otherwise my trusty i7 4790k’s going to another 14nm, or Ryzen 2 just isn‘t that significant of an upgrade.

2020 will be a great year for us...


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## paaltio (Mar 1, 2020)

ProfoundSilence said:


> honestly I havent looked at cpus since the zen debut because I'm not building anything. Everyone I know who's asked me to build a pc has not needed an upgrade in years.
> 
> And that said, I havent kept up with the nomenclature so I just assumed it was thread ripper.



Yes sorry I didn't mean it as a criticism, I was just hoping there would be a 3970X benchmark somewhere that I overlooked! But I'll keep searching. I've been meaning to build a computer with the 3970X, but the 64/128 problems are a bit worrying... But what I'm really interested are the 256 numbers. Hopefully funnybear has some for us coming up!


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## ProfoundSilence (Mar 1, 2020)

paaltio said:


> Yes sorry I didn't mean it as a criticism, I was just hoping there would be a 3970X benchmark somewhere that I overlooked! But I'll keep searching. I've been meaning to build a computer with the 3970X, but the 64/128 problems are a bit worrying... But what I'm really interested are the 256 numbers. Hopefully funnybear has some for us coming up!


No offense taken, I'm just blown away in general at the polyphony count differences


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## Usernamed (Mar 23, 2020)

Hi Funnybear! How is the 3970x build going ?


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## JamieLang (Mar 24, 2020)

So what's the bottleneck on the DSP? ...the DSP is literally the same (within margin of error) without regard for the buffer size. So, something...is seriously bottlenecking the session. The instrument scale more...but...why? Typically, they're NOT CPU bound like pure audio DSP is--they're using a complex combination of drive IO, memory bandwidth, and normal audio interface driver IO buffering---audio DSP is just CPU plus a stereo (or small number) set of driver IO streams. 

I suppose I could read to find out....but, to me, it makes me discount the instrument testing because the audio DSP is SO bottlenecked on something that is NOT the thing DOING the audio DSP.


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## rgames (Mar 24, 2020)

Do you guys find that the DAWBench tests relate to what you see in your projects?

I've not seen a meaningful difference in CPUs for about a decade. I have some benchmark projects that I've kept for about that long and I've loaded them up on a bunch of different CPUs and they all run at basically the same latency. And that latency was pretty much low enough (< 10 ms) a decade ago.

Of course the CPU usage changes. But the same project runs at basically same latency.

It would be much more instructive for them to show an actual musical project that won't run on one CPU but will run on another. I've never seen that. I can't think of a project where I used 200 plug-ins, so that's not a meaningful metric for me.

I'm guessing they charge more for the systems that include the CPUs with the bigger bars...

rgames


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## colony nofi (Mar 24, 2020)

rgames said:


> Do you guys find that the DAWBench tests relate to what you see in your projects?
> 
> I've not seen a meaningful difference in CPUs for about a decade. I have some benchmark projects that I've kept for about that long and I've loaded them up on a bunch of different CPUs and they all run at basically the same latency. And that latency was pretty much low enough (< 10 ms) a decade ago.
> 
> ...


I understand where you are coming from, but it really does depend on workflow.
Folk who REALLY notice the difference new CPU's make include those who
Do loads of complex routing (routing is a massive cpu hog in things like Cubase. There's a few folk testing this in various forms... and version to version DAWs don't stay the same. Sad to say cubase is not as efficient as it used to be - in some measure!)
Do you mix in surround as you go? Film / Game scoring where you are deliving 16 quad or say 7.0 stems... and thats all being driven in real time, grabbing multiple mic signals from kontakt. When its setup as templates, its like composing in a normal stereo environment, except it isn't.... its essentially setup with a simple surround mix from composition start. Some people use this for their workflows / its completely necessary given time and budget constraints.
And sort of ambisonic work LOVES more cpu. So if like me you do a reasonable number of commissions for museums / installations.....

And then some synths are harder on CPU than others.

And some types of writing... the biggest on is tempo ramps, which kontakt does not play well with at all - I've seen konakt need 400% the headroom to run through various tempo ramps.

I have so many sessions that I run today that won't run on my old machines. Even some that won't run on the trash can's that have done us well for a while.

Not everyone - but many people do need more CPU cycles.


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## JamieLang (Mar 24, 2020)

What I was asking has nothing to do with more CPU cycles being a 'need' or not.

The test....this time at least, has a huge, glaring flaw. At no point can ANY CPU do the same amount of audio DSP at 1024 and 64 samples of latency unless it's literally ALWAYS sitting around waiting on something else.


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## rgames (Mar 24, 2020)

colony nofi said:


> I understand where you are coming from, but it really does depend on workflow.
> Folk who REALLY notice the difference new CPU's make include those who
> Do loads of complex routing (routing is a massive cpu hog in things like Cubase. There's a few folk testing this in various forms... and version to version DAWs don't stay the same. Sad to say cubase is not as efficient as it used to be - in some measure!)
> Do you mix in surround as you go? Film / Game scoring where you are deliving 16 quad or say 7.0 stems... and thats all being driven in real time, grabbing multiple mic signals from kontakt. When its setup as templates, its like composing in a normal stereo environment, except it isn't.... its essentially setup with a simple surround mix from composition start. Some people use this for their workflows / its completely necessary given time and budget constraints.
> ...


Yeah I hear you, especially on the ramp tempo changes. But I still run into real-time (ASIO) performance limitations long before I hit CPU limitations these days. I guess I don't really have any complex routing - my orchestral template has 15 or so group channels and 5 or 6 FX channels in a template that's something like 400 tracks that uses two slaves and VEPro over Ethernet. That template runs at the same latency on just about any mid-range CPU from the last 10 years. I haven't seen any benefit in high-end CPUs.

That's why I think some kind of demo project would be much more instructive than the DAWBench results. I don't know what to do with the DAWBench info - I can't see how it relates. Seeing an actual project would be much more beneficial.

rgames


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