Polyphony test results!!

[ed hamilton]

I have moaned about kontakts poor polyphony on my mac 667 for a while now.
The mac gets only 24 voices before SPLAT!
My PIII 800 gets over 40.

But my new P4 2.4ghz......drum roll.........

90 stereo voices!!!
Easily without issues. And this is without streaming anything.
Not bad at all.

Oh, and this is using a 128 sample buffer!!!!
If feels almost as tight as giga!

I am building another PC just for Kontakt!!!

Please feel free to suggest any more detailed tests. I would be happy to pound on this system for you.

ed

[Paul Vicory]

Very good ed, that\'s pretty much in line with what I\'ve been getting on my 2.6 GHz P4 system.

[Chadwick]

To be honest Ed, I would have hoped for more than 90 - if the samples aren\'t streaming - . As I understand it, the main reason Gstudio doesn\'t achieve more than 160 mono voices is that ALL those voices are streamed and there\'s a limit to the number of streams that can be squeezed out of a hard disk simultaneously. If there\'s no streaming going on, surely that hardware bottleneck is gone and we should be seeing a bigger increase - no?

[midphase]

Dig that! The real test is what can you get with massive streaming as in: VOTA, GOS, VSL all running together.

I can get 120 stereo voices on my crappy ol\' Mac with Unity Session running from RAM, but the disk streaming is where things get hairy!

[ngstime]

I have unity on my 500g3 and it works great! although I haven\'t stepped up to session yet, I hear the streaming is very buggy, so why pay to upgrade to a feature that isn\'t worth a pooh. down side is I can\'t import giga.

I\'m stuck on getting kontakt for mac, seems like older macs work better then the newer ones (from what i\'m gathering) I think I\'m gonna get it anyways.

I see kontakt comes with both mac and pc in one. Does this mean: if it stinks on my mac I can put it on a pc without getting another licence? If not, does that also mean we can have it on more then one machine without additional licenses?


Aaron Dirk
NGS West

[midphase]

I see kontakt comes with both mac and pc in one. Does this mean: if it stinks on my mac I can put it on a pc without getting another licence? If not, does that also mean we can have it on more then one machine without additional licenses? <font size=\"2\" face=\"Verdana, Arial\">Use your own imagination...although you already know the answer that you\'re going to get here!

[Bob Monk]

Do all your Kontakt patches have filters and FX on?????

I\'m running a PIII 800 under win98se and can get 86 stereo voices in Kontakt running Logic 5.3 and a delta 1010 on low lantency graemlins/tounge_images/icons/smile.gif anymore and it starts to crackle. I have no FX or filters on but i have ADSR envelopes on them.

I\'m really amazed to see such poor performance from a P4...as i plan to upgrade soon. Can people give a more accurate discription of what they are actually doing.

Cheers.

Bob.

[ngstime]

nevermind....

[Chris Caouette]

Interesting results Ed. I can get 80 stereo voices with DFD disabled on my g4 800 and that is at 512k buffer. Not great, but a usable latency. I haven\'t lowered the buffer yet and done tests, but I still though this was really good.
I am suprised that your PC only got to 90 voices however.
Chris

PS Just tested at 128k = 65 stereo voices, and at 256k = 72 stereo voices. Not to bad for a slower mac.

[ed hamilton]

Chris,
Your G4 800 is doing way better than my 667 titanium is!!

I was not using any effects in my tests but I need a 128 buffer. Anything more feels too mushy and I just can\'t deal.

I am actually happy with 90+ voices with that low of a buffer.
I will be tweeking my pc, maybe it can do better.

ed

[Netvudu]

The real test is what can you get with massive streaming as in: VOTA, GOS, VSL all running together <font size=\"2\" face=\"Verdana, Arial\">Well.That would be a real test...for my bank account. graemlins/tounge_images/icons/smile.gif

[ed hamilton]

I did not get those same results from unity session at all!!!!

Personally I am not interested in Kontakt streaming. Thats what I got giga for.

I will test out the streaming in the next couple days and I will post the results.

[Chris Caouette]

Notebooks seem to be strained on their resources more than their desktop counterparts whether it be mac or PC. However, my 1 gig Athlon did choke at a much lower polyphony which I was suprised (using XP). What I am happy about is with that many voices I can keep the older g4 as a stand alone sampler when I get another mac.
Chris

[Martin Jann]

My experience with a Mac G4/733 Quicksilver and Kontakt 1.2 :

Ram based playback with sound manager (128 sample buffer), no effects, just an envelope

= 140 Stereo voices

without envelope

= 170 Stereo voices

DFD based playback (5400 rpm Harddisk, not defragmented), same instrument:

= 30 Stereo voices

PC specs will follow later...

Best,

Martin

[Chris Caouette]

Thats very good results. You were using as a standalone or as a plug in? The results I posted are with DP running underneath.
Chris

[ed hamilton]

Martin,
thanks for the post!

BUT I am not getting anything near that in polyphony.
Maybe I should have been expecting more than 90ish voices.

I have sessions the rest of the week but I will try and make some time to tweek my system and see if anything improves.

[ed hamilton]

Any suggestions on what may help?

[Martin Jann]

Chris: These tests were made using the standalone version.

Ed: Its really strange that you only get such a limited number of voices out of your mac. Maybe that your host is using already quite a lot of cpu ?

What kind of instruments do you use ? If there are filters and effects used in the instruments, the number of voices will decrease, because filters might be processed for each voice (80 voices = 80 flters) when using the filter on group level.

What kind of soundcard do you use ? My Digi001 performs worse than the sound manager for example.

[Chris Caouette]

I am using a Delta 1010 and get the same results with sound manager. Perhaps you could post a reccomended card? I am building an Athlon PC for VST instruments, so I will post my findings for everyone with I get it all together.

Also, Martin, did you see my post with my mac\'s specs that robertf asked for? I was wondering if you have been able to replicate the CPU spike issue when using DP.

Thanks
Chris

[midphase]

Hello Martin,

While I don\'t doubt your tests, I do believe that a product like Kontakt should be tested within a \'real world\' setting such as used in conjunction with a sequencer such as Cubase, DP, Logic or Cakewalk.

What I really want to know is what polyphony are you getting while running Kontakt on a Mac and PC from within a sequencer that utilizes some plug-ins and audio tracks with and without disk streaming? Oh, and while you\'re at it, could you also add Absynth to the mix and see what type of results you get?

The main appeal of Kontakt is to finally have a solid streaming solution running on the same workstation as your main sequencer (ideally on a Mac).

Please let us know.

PS.

I would also appreciate some non-NI benchmarks for a similiar set-up.

[Hasen]

Originally posted by Martin Jann:
My experience with a Mac G4/733 Quicksilver and Kontakt 1.2 :

Ram based playback with sound manager (128 sample buffer), no effects, just an envelope

= 140 Stereo voices

without envelope

= 170 Stereo voices

DFD based playback (5400 rpm Harddisk, not defragmented), same instrument:

= 30 Stereo voices

PC specs will follow later...

Best,

Martin <font size=\"2\" face=\"Verdana, Arial\">Why are these tests run on a clapped-out old Powermac? At least put a decent hard drive in there. This information (while impressive for what it is, from RAM anyway) is not too useful as I doubt anyone is running a setup like this - certainly not streaming with a non-dedicated, slow as hell 5400RPM drive! images/icons/confused.gif

[Chris Caouette]

Hasen,
Why not? I can agree about the hard drive, but a lot of studios still use the older slower macs (me being one of them). It still works. I think the non streaming voice count is decent for that machine.
Chris

[ed hamilton]

DFD results.
Using my 120 gig western digital with 8 meg buffer I got 80 stereo streaming voices without a problem.

I still can\'t get anywhere near the high polyphony count of others though (non streaming).

I have tweaked my system and had very little improvement.

[Martin Jann]

Hi Hasen,

I think the setup I am running with my Mac is pretty much average standard. Of course a 5400 Harddrive is not an optimum but the results are just meant to give you an idea.
Every system has its own results and the best thing to try out what works the best is to download the demo and try it on your own system (in case you don´t already have Kontakt). I´m also about to buy an external Firewire HD which I´ll try at home. I´ll let you know my results later this week.

Best,

Martin