chrisdfrith wrote:Hi Martin,
I followed the steps you outlined:
The following are again disabled in the BIOS:
----------- AMD Precision Boost (X-Boost).
----------- AMD Cool N Quiet.
----------- Trusted Computing.
----------- AMD ftpM
Processor power management' node both the Minimum and Maximum 'Plugged in' settings are set to 70%
Rebooted.
Launched HW Alt 1
Executed File | Revert all settings to factory defaults
Relaunched HW Alt 1
Confirmed MOTU ASIO driver (with 1 buffer, buffer size=1024, 48 kHz)
Loaded St. Anne's
CPU spikes begin immediately and continue as long as the organ remains loaded
I am in between MIDI controllers (aka console) right now. I sold my previous console and am waiting for the new console to be completed and delivered. So I cannot complete the additional testing with chords held down.
The results above are the same as I have experienced using my primary HW profile since this issue first appeared 6-8 weeks back. The CPU spikes begin as soon as the MIDI and Audio engine starts and continue whether I am playing a MIDI file or letting the organ sit idle. So far, the only steps that stop the CPU spikes are to reset the processor affinity as noted in the YouTube video. If playing back a MIDI file (or live play when I had my old console), the CPU spikes cause audio glitches until they are stopped by resetting the processor affinity.
It is curious that others with AMD processors are experiencing similar (but not entirely identical) issues.
Chris
Chris
Thanks, Chris.
My apologies for a delayed reply (I was away last week).
I've been testing what happens to the CPU core affinities of a process's threads when one simply opens and OKs that Windows "Set affinity" dialogue box, and the result is that the act of doing that sets the affinities for all of the process's threads back to defaults, thus clearing the thread affinities that Hauptwerk had set for its threads, and allowing Windows to put any of the audio threads on any of the cores (rather than the specific cores to which Hauptwerk had assigned them).
When audio/MIDI starts Hauptwerk intentionally puts a separate audio engine thread on each of the CPU cores (except for cores 0-3, which it keeps clear of audio engine load, so that non-audio-engine threads can use them). On very nearly all PCs, setting the affinities of those audio engine threads in that way significantly improves performance and resilience to audio glitches (otherwise the Windows kernel is liable to put several audio engine threads on the same CPU core, and leave them there until the CPU core becomes overloaded, by which time it's too late since an audio glitch would already have occurred).
However, I think what must be happening on your PC (and that of the person in the video) is that something else (aside from Hauptwerk) is running on your PC with its affinity set to to a particular CPU core that Hauptwerk is trying to use for its audio engine, and that other process's thread is taking a lot of CPU time (maybe at an extremely high process/thread priority) on that particular core away from Hauptwerk, resulting in an audio glitch in Hauptwerk. Given that the people who had this problem were using AMD CPUs, perhaps that other process/thread is part of some driver that some AMD motherboards use, for example. Given also that the problem only started for you (Chris) recently, I think it's likely that some automatic Windows/driver/application update was installed at that time on your PC which caused it.
With St. Anne's loaded, but without actually playing anything on it (and without doing anything with CPU affinity):
- If you look at the 'Details' tab in Task Manager (and scroll through the list of processes if needed), which processes listed there have base priorities higher than 'Normal'?
- Also, in Windows Resource Monitor (which can be opened from the button at the bottom of the Performance tab in Task Manager), do any of core numbers 4-23 appear to be loaded significantly (more than, say, 25%)? (If so, some process other than Hauptwerk is presumably causing that.)
Best regards, Martin.
Hauptwerk software designer/developer, Milan Digital Audio.