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Ram Speed Thoughts

Buying or building computers for Hauptwerk, recommendations, troubleshooting computer hardware issues.
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montyjnc

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Ram Speed Thoughts

PostThu Apr 16, 2020 9:40 am

Hello all-

As ram speeds seem to just climb higher and higher (up to 4800mhz now!), do you think we will see any measurable performance increase in Hauptwerk? From what I understand, the most latency introduced is due to the audio interface/CPU, correct? Based on this, I would doubt ram speed would make much of a difference but I was curious (particularly with DDR5 on its way to the market... likely at some astronomical cost if you wanted 64gb+ as we need for hauptwerk though)
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mdyde

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Re: Ram Speed Thoughts

PostFri Apr 17, 2020 3:59 am

Hello Monty,

montyjnc wrote:From what I understand, the most latency introduced is due to the audio interface/CPU, correct?


Broadly, reliably-achievable (audio glitch free) latency with just a few pipes sounding is mainly determined by the audio interface hardware, its driver, the computer's motherboard, the operating system, and the computer's other hardware and drivers (performance of the system's hardware/drivers in terms of DPC latency, PCIe/USB host controllers, hardware/driver timing jitter, operating system thread scheduler behaviour, etc.).

High polyphonies mainly place demands on the CPU (and to some extent RAM), but achieving high polyphony at low latency is more demanding than doing so at higher latencies because then the system has less capacity to absorb fluctuations/spikes in processing demand from other things (hardware/drivers, other processes running, etc.), i.e. timing/jitter becomes much more critical.

montyjnc wrote:As ram speeds seem to just climb higher and higher (up to 4800mhz now!), do you think we will see any measurable performance increase in Hauptwerk?


The CPU is usually the main bottleneck these days (for high polyphony, and fast organ loading), so RAM speed probably won't make very much difference (assuming your CPU has a large and fast enough CPU cache), but faster RAM certainly doesn't hurt (all else being equal). CPU performance (base CPU clock speed, CPU cache size/performance, number of cores, CPU generation, etc.: viewtopic.php?f=16&t=18044#p138434 ) is likely to be more important.
Best regards, Martin.
Hauptwerk software designer/developer, Milan Digital Audio.
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montyjnc

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Re: Ram Speed Thoughts

PostSun Apr 19, 2020 6:03 pm

Thank you Martin, will all of the recent hardware such as DDR5 RAM, ryzens 3 generation 3000 series (and threadrippers), I am interested to see how things develop!
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mdyde

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Re: Ram Speed Thoughts

PostMon Apr 20, 2020 3:28 am

Thanks, Monty.
Best regards, Martin.
Hauptwerk software designer/developer, Milan Digital Audio.

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