Hi, looking for some advice. Running Gig Performer 4 on Windows 10 Thinkpad P52 with 128GB Ram and all SSD drives. CPU is Intel i7-8850H @ 2.60 GHz. I have optimized it as per the recommendation in the Gig Performer Optimization section. Audio interface is a Focusrite 8i6 3rd Gen. Going directly into its own USB input on the laptop. When audio setup is 44100 Hz and 128 samples (2.9ms), Gig Performer latency measurement is 15.1ms. This is too long of a latency for playing piano VSTs without a sluggish feeling. If I reduce the buffer to 96 samples, RTL is 12.7ms, which seems to be the best compromise allowing about 30% CPU headroom for my most taxing rackspaces. Does it seem like my laptop CPU speed is preventing a higher sample/lower latency? Just wondering if the bottleneck is the laptop or the audio interface, and if my results are reasonable considering my components.
Which Audio driver are you using? The official Focusrite ASIO driver?
That’s correct.
Keep in mind that that’s a round-trip. So the latency of the output of an vst-instrument is half of that.
The settings menu of the focus rite driver (reachable through the system tray icon) also has an option safe-buffer or something like that. Turning that off gives you another millisecond.
I use a scarlet 4i4 3rd gen for guitar. 48k/64 samples, i7-10xxx laptop cpu. I encounter the full round-trip, because I monitor myself through the audio device: all my effects are in GP. I do not have trouble with this latency, but whether you can live with it or not is very personal, I guess.
Being the cpu somewhat older imposes some limitations to making the buffer smaller.
This is probably a key information!
You just made me look closer at the Focusrite settings window and I see it already tells me what my RTL is without even booting up Gig Performer. And if I turn off Safe Mode and run it at 48/96 I get 8.2ms, 392 samples, with Safe Mode on it’s 9.2ms with 440 samples. I think anything under 10ms for fast piano playing would work. I’m going to play around with that some more. I had a couple rackspaces with multiple instances of Swam stuff which taxes my CPU and need to be changed. The open terrain of Gig Performer allows so many possibilities, still finding the best way to do things. Thanks for sharing your experience.