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How to increase CPU with NANCY

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B777Captain

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How to increase CPU with NANCY

PostFri Aug 20, 2021 4:58 pm

Gang…

My CPU gets so close to and sometime does go into the red with Nancy in a full tutti. I’ve looked on youtube for ways to increase its capability and so far, everything I’ve seen on youtube is already checked or selected to maximize the CPU power.

If I could put pics here on this website I would, but its too complicated (Martin!!!! :-).

My polyphony is about 6000, My CPU is an Intel i9 3.30 GHz. I’ve basically done what I can think of from research and questions I’ve asked. I am not willing to reduce the settings of the Nancy (from 4 to 2 perspectives for example).

I know this is not as much info as you might need but….. Does anyone have this issue with the NANCY sample set? How would I best solve this issue?

Thanks

Pat
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mdyde

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Re: How to increase CPU with NANCY

PostSat Aug 21, 2021 3:44 am

Hello Ed,

I understand from other users that the Nancy sample set is *extremely* CPU-intensive (especially due to the number of virtual pipes it uses simultaneously per real pipe, since it plays tremulant-affected samples at the same time as non-tremulant-affected samples, for cross-fading between them). Aside from disabling some perspectives or buying an even more powerful CPU, and assuming that you're already using a good-quality audio interface/ASIO driver, your two main options are:

- Make sure your audio buffer size setting on the 'General settings | Audio device ...' screen is set to to 512 (or try 1024 if it's already set to 512). Buffer sizes smaller than 512 are considerably more CPU-intensive.

- Reduce the polyphony limit setting. The polyphony limit exists to allow you to prevent the CPU from being overloaded. You might well find that you can reduce it by a moderate amount without any noticeable adverse effects on the reverb tails.
Best regards, Martin.
Hauptwerk software designer/developer, Milan Digital Audio.
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mundiglo

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Re: How to increase CPU with NANCY

PostSun Aug 22, 2021 2:22 pm

You could try to overclock your cpu. I use an i9 @4.3GHz full polyphony at 512 buffer size with no problems in the tutti (RME UFX).
Depending on your surround system, I found the mid microphones dispensible.
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Andrew Grahame

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Re: How to increase CPU with NANCY

PostSun Aug 22, 2021 4:08 pm

There's a reality which many of us have to face. Some older computers just can't handle some recent sample sets. My Hauptwerk PC has been replaced twice in the course of my time with Hauptwerk, and the current unit has been upgraded twice (once with a new motherboard and processor) - but it has its limits in terms of the demands made by some of today's latest sample sets.

I tested out the Nancy demo - and immediately abandoned any thought of purchasing it on seeing how it responded in my PC. There was no way I could justify the expense of that sample set while I still have this computer.

Some day in the future I'll upgrade - but by then, who knows what some sample set producers will aim for in terms of computing power.
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mnailor

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Re: How to increase CPU with NANCY

PostSun Aug 22, 2021 5:45 pm

Unfortunately, you're probably not going to run 4 perspectives with full releases on your CPU, which is a little more powerful than mine. When our machines don't have the CPU capacity to run all of Nancy, we have two choices: Run as much as the machine can handle, or buy a much more expensive machine. There are 14 core and larger CPUs that would be an upgrade from your 10 core, but the prices and cooling requirements are ... ouch...

There isn't some technical fix we're all missing (in the 60+ answers to your post on facebook) that will make this work if you can't consider running 3 perspectives and maybe truncating Close releases to fit your CPU capacity. That's exactly what I do, and it sounds fantastic with the level percentages adjusted for my speakers. Other compromises would also work, but they all require omitting at least one perspective because our CPUs are just not big enough.

Please try to find a mix of 3 mic positions that you like hearing and that your machine can handle. There's nothing special about using a mix of all the possible mic positions -- I use only 2 out of 3 on most of the 6 channel surround samplesets with fine results, and Nancy sounds great with 3 out of 4. Piotr's suggestion was to leave something out, and he knows Nancy really well. :D

I wasn't able to get a mix of 2 perspectives alone that I liked for my audio system, but 3 performs fine on my slower 8 core i9900, so 3 should be even better on yours.

Also, my CPU *can* run 4 perspectives in the green, but only if I truncate releases on the Close samples, so the polyphony demand is closer to 3 perspectives. Because of memory limitation of 64 GB, and because Rear reverb is heard in Middle, I don't run it that way. It was just a trial.
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B777Captain

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Re: How to increase CPU with NANCY

PostThu Aug 26, 2021 3:02 pm

Thanks Everyone!

So It sounds like no matter what power you have in your computer, no one really can run Nancy FULL ON with no limitations or truncated releases, or reduced perspectives. That is one helluva sample…. Right up my alley and quite honestly, I think I could have this sample and maybe only 1 other and be happy the rest of my HW life! Lol.

But thank you all for the suggestions.

Last question: *IF I was to get a new CPU (and matchable motherboard) with say… 18 or 24 cores, would that make Full Nancy playable with my 128GB computer?

Pat.
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mnailor

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Re: How to increase CPU with NANCY

PostThu Aug 26, 2021 5:20 pm

Based on his demos of Nancy on YouTube, I got the impression that Richard McVeigh is running all 4 perspectives on his machine. I think he mentioned that in his long Nancy demo when he talked about wanting the church listening position rather than at the console.

I don't know how to contact him (maybe facebook), but if you can figure that out, it might be useful to know what CPU he's running and whether he cut down Nancy samples or HW options to make it work.
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B777Captain

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Re: How to increase CPU with NANCY

PostThu Aug 26, 2021 10:52 pm

Thanks Mark….

Good idea.

Pat
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mdyde

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Re: How to increase CPU with NANCY

PostFri Aug 27, 2021 3:39 am

Hello Pat,

If buying a new CPU with more cores, I would recommend making sure that it doesn't have significantly less per-core performance (base clock speed, etc.), since per-core performance is still extremely important:

viewtopic.php?f=16&t=19945#p149617

mdyde wrote:- Hauptwerk's audio and convolution reverb engines should run distributed across any number of logical cores up to 64.

- If I recall correctly, the most I've ever heard of anyone using with Hauptwerk is 32 physical cores, although more commonly up to 16 or 24 (and even then, more than 12 is rare).

- More CPU cores do potentially benefit polyphony and the convolution reverb engine, but per-core CPU performance is still extremely important, since threads running on different cores inevitably sometimes need to communicate with each other (thread synchronisation, exchanging data, etc.), and the more cores there are, the more the overheads in keeping them synchronised. Hence with huge numbers of cores there may eventually be a point beyond which more cores even reduce overall performance. Although I can't give advice based on benchmarks, my inclination would be to be wary of going much beyond about 8 physical cores if doing so also involved a significant trade-off in per-core performance (base clock speed, etc.).

- Base clock speed, CPU cache, and memory bandwidth are also extremely important, as is making sure that any candidate CPU has support for the AVX2 instruction set.

- If it doesn't involve much of a trade-off in per-core performance (base clock speed, etc.), then I would expect that up to something like 16 physical CPU cores (32 logical) would scale well with minimal additional synchronisation overheads. (Numbers of cores beyond that may well perform well too, but we don't have feedback on that.)

- Hauptwerk's sample set cache loading mechanism (which determines how fast organs are loaded into memory) can currently take advantage of up to 6 CPU cores (but more won't hurt).

- The MIDI/relay event processing (organ switches, pipe on/off events, etc.) are necessarily serialised to ensure that the state of the organ relay remains consistent.

- Each of the background models (wind supply models, pipework modulation, tremulants) runs in its own thread (one thread per model). That's done since the wind model's time-slices need to be extremely short/frequent (sub-millisecond) and serialised. (It might possibly be be able to gain some performance in the future from further multi-threading the wind model within the time-slices, but possibly not, since the overheads of so many, extremely frequent, thread context switches might exceed any potential performance gain.)

- The first few logical cores are kept free of audio/convolution engine loads, and are instead used for the MIDI/relay, background models, and other threads. If there are 12 or more logical CPU cores then the first 4 logical cores will be reserved for those purposes.

- Hence per-core performance may well become a bottleneck for the achievable polyphony, even if you had a huge number of cores for the audio engine.

So in summary, to emphasize again: per-core performance (base clock speed, etc.) is still very, very important, even with a lot of cores.
Best regards, Martin.
Hauptwerk software designer/developer, Milan Digital Audio.
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mnailor

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Re: How to increase CPU with NANCY

PostFri Aug 27, 2021 7:26 am

In Martin's last, I think "mnailor wrote" was meant to be someone who actually knows those things. I don't even play a HW developer on TV. Thanks!
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mdyde

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Re: How to increase CPU with NANCY

PostFri Aug 27, 2021 7:43 am

Thanks, Mark. Oops -- my apologies for the copy/paste error! I've edited it to correct it now.
Best regards, Martin.
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Re: How to increase CPU with NANCY

PostFri Aug 27, 2021 12:02 pm

My opinion on the topic: viewtopic.php?f=4&t=19968

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