Now I know for sure Gig Performer / laptop solution is the best way (i.e. not/never return Korg Kronos/hardware synths), I’m thinking of getting a better laptop somewhere this/next year (and keep my current laptop as backup).
However, I wonder if the CPU performance i(shown in GP) is improving kind of linearly with the amount/usage of plugins.
I’m currently using sometimes plugins which are CPU heavy (Massive X, Vital, IK Multimedia Hammomd B3X), and wonder if I get a 3x faster laptop, I get 3 times the lower CPU usage shown in GP.
E.g, I’m having a I7 core 6820 HQ processor, which has according to cpubenchmark.net a single thread rating of 2012 and a CPU mark of 7010. If I compare it with a quite recent CPU, like a I7 core 12700H, the single thread rating is almost twice as high and the CPU mark almost 4 times. See the table below.
GP works on one thread, so can I assume I can use the single thread rating ratio to ‘calculate’ how much plugins I can use, or the CPU mark, or is it not that simple?
My IK Multimedia B-3X plugin uses 20% (shown in GP) on my 6820HQ. Can I then assume that a 12700H would then result in roughly two times less (single threaded rating ratio) thus 10%, or four times less (CPU mark ratio) thus 5%, or even something else?
Shown in GP (I added it in the post, but also was there one time, but indeed, was not too clear). I notice on my laptop when it goes beyond 80% I have to be careful for pops/cracks.
I recently bought a NUC13I7xxx with an I7-1360P, so I could do some real life comparisons with GP. My I7-1360P is roughly 30% faster than my old cpu (single core). Question: Does that reflect in GP also? Answer: Yes it does. Some figures:
(All tests with GP below were made with 64@48KHz audio settings)
Single GP instance:
CPU I7-10750H I7-1360P
Instances VST 2 3
Multiple GP instances:
CPU I7-10750H I7-1360P
Instances GP/VST 3/2 6/3
Total instances 6 18
As you can see, with single GP instance, I can add 1 VST instance without audio glitches. That is not exactly 30%, but that’s 50%, but the added load per VST instance is not very granular, the way I did this: My old cpu can almost do 3 instances (but not really) and the new cpu can almost do 4 (also not really). The difference 3 → 4 is actually 30%. This suggests the single core performance scales rather nice with the ‘Single Thread Rating’.
The multi-core - multi GP instances comparison figures do not add up this nicely: 12066 to 19621 (~50%), but the also here the granularity muddles the figures: When I’m pushing it, the old cpu I can almost do 3 * 3 = 9 instances. On new cpu, more than 18 instances (whatever the way it is distributed) is just not possible.
TL:DR:
Although it is hard to say whether your cpu usage will drop the way you hope/expect, the figures from the comparisons are really not bad pointers to follow. The tests I did, roughly confirm the validity of the comparisons. So I think/hope it’s safe to say that figures of the comparison shouldn’t be too far off the real life figures.
I expect you will at least have a huge leap forward performance wise, especially since your old cpu was somewhat slower than mine, while your new cpu has more P cores.
To push your system to the limit, you will have use multiple GP instances, but that is not always feasible/practical/usable.
BTW: To avoid glitches and audio dropouts, on Windows you will have to make sure that GP doesn’t ‘land’ on E cores, as these are considerably slower than P cores. I’m not in the business of promoting my own stuff, but I recently wrote a VST that takes care of that.
Thank you very much for this elaborated post. And I’m glad with the outcome, meaning even when I would get a (slightly) slower laptop than a 12700H it still would be a huge improvement.
(I noticed I entered the wrong CPU, I have an 6820HQ instead of EQ, and the HQ is even a little bit slower).
I saw your VST (liked that post a lot, although relevant when I have a newer CPU).
Also, I checked one time for a mini PC (like NUC), however, I prefer the big screen so much, I’m better off with a laptop (instead of having a separate mini PC, and separate screen).
I also haven’t checked using multiple GP instances, I need the GUI, but I could run maybe some heavy CPU VSTS’s on the background (not sure if I can easily ’ route’ audio from one instance to another).
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