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I swapped my NVIDIA card for an AMD RADEON and now my DAW is running much better

quantum7

quantum7

I'd rather be composing than decomposing
Before building a new PC due to problems that I assumed were motherboard related, I thought it would be worth buying an AMD Radeon garphics card, an RX 570 to be exact. I've been using it for 36 hours now and have only had 1 single audio crackle.....in comparison with multiple crackles and pops every hour with the NVIDIA graphics card. Of course I need to test this out for at least a good week to make sure, but so far it may have been that lousy NVIDIA card all along that was giving me problems.
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Thinking of doing this myself. I had much better performance with the Intel motherboard graphics, but needed more ports. My NVIDIA 1060 TI is decent, but the system is just not as smooth - there are spikes every once in a while. Thanks for the report.
 
Don't GPUs have pretty much no effect on audio performance? Unless you're speaking in terms of unintended compatibility issues, in which case it still sounds a bit too anecdotal to draw conclusions from. To offer my equally anecdotal experience, I get no crackles with my Nvidia GPU.
 
I was having a lot of spikes and very high usage readings in Cubase & Nuendo with an HD4650; swapped it out for an r5 230 and have had much better DAW performance since, even in Pro Tools.
 
Yeah, there was another thread recently that touched on this.
While running the latency monitor app, the nvidia driver seems to turn up to be the culprit. It just seems to be very poor drivers on NVIDIA’s part.
 
Zhao Shen said:
Don't GPUs have pretty much no effect on audio performance?
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GPU's have nothing to do with audio processing. They do talk to the CPU though. If they do this through poor drivers, the CPU has to pay attention to them too much. This means the CPU is not available for audio at that time. If the buffers empty, this means drop outs. So, GPU's don't process audio, but video drivers can cause audio dropouts..
 
its true that nvidia drivers give higher dpc latency, but also with an nvidia card you shouldnt get any crackles on win7/10. there are alot of other things which can cause this. energy saving, network driver, speedstepping etc.

in fact you can optimize your system with any configuration and dont get any crackles or pops. its just a bit of work.
 
I just changed from an Nvidia GTX1060 to a Radeon RX560. Lower CPU usage and substantially lower, and stable DPC latency. Win 10/Cubase user here. I can report that I am MUCH better off on an AMD card than Nvidia. I do not game at all, but do drive a 4k monitor and 1080p touchscreen from the card. Both cards run at idle from a GPU load perspective, and the fans don't even run. But AMD's drivers are a much better fit into my system.
 
erica-grace said:
Hi :)

What brand Radeon RX 570 did you guys get? Gigabyte, MSI....?

Thanks!
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https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0716ZH99H (This one!) Nothing fancy. By gamer standards it is a lower mid-range card. For media composition, it is massive overkill. But I essentially bought low DPC latency drivers, not graphics performance. The fans never run on my card. Refreshing a DAW screen is not even work for this card.
 
kitekrazy said:
Interesting. I don't like Radeon cards because of their power consumption compared to nVidia.
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I'm afraid I don't understand. In a DAW, these cards are idle. Barely running. Their performance under full load is unimportant - a DAW system will never go there. (unless you game on your DAW). The power draw difference at idle has to be inconsequential compared to what else is in the studio. Driver latency is way more important than 5 or 10W here or there isn't it?

You made me curious. The idle power draw of the Radeon 570 is about 16-17W. The idle power draw of a GTX1060 is about 10W on a desktop with dual monitors just sitting idle (which is pretty much a DAW).

In relative terms, this is a HUGE difference. But we aren't talking a 160% increase at 200W. It's at 10w. Literally 6-7W. A USB hub. Less than half of an LED light bulb. I consider this ignorable.

I don't game. So I have no opinion on that. For a DAW, I don't think power consumption is worth thinking about.
 
JohnG said:
There is misinformation in this thread. Short version: your choice of card can have a big impact on your audio performance.

I'm with @EvilDragon who wrote:
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This has been my experience. My Cubase rig is substantially happier with a Radeon card. My systems are always fully tuned. It wasn't system tuning. It was the card. $140 for better drivers is cheap given the footprint of the studio.
 
The fact I have an Nvidia 1060 in my Mac Pro 5,1 is likely the reason I have experience really laggy behaviour with Cubase. I’m going to go ATI next but not sure what card as I’ve always had Nvidia.
 
jononotbono said:
The fact I have an Nvidia 1060 in my Mac Pro 5,1 is likely the reason I have experience really laggy behaviour with Cubase. I’m going to go ATI next but not sure what card as I’ve always had Nvidia.
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Using built-in video ports on the motherboard of two PCs has worked much better. I am using one MSI AMD Radeon HD 6450 with a 2GB cache on one computer, which also has worked better than Nvidia.

No knock on Nvidia as graphics cards -- they are fine, just driver problems with audio, so best avoided.
 
Somebody told me that when you install nVidia drivers, you should be extra careful about exactly what you install along with them, instead of just clicking through the installer. Never ever ever install nVidia Experience and shit like that - just hogs your system.
 
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