Topic: RME HDSPe AIO crackling below 7ms latency

Hello,

No matter what sample rate or buffer size I try, lower latency I can get is 7ms.

AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1950x
Asrock X399 Taichi
DDR4 2666 32GB RAM
2 NVMe SSD drive
1 SATA3 SSD drive
nVidia GTX 980
RME HDSPe AIO
Reaper
Ableton Live

I'm used to the "Windows 7/10 optimization" tricks so I've tried everything, from updating drivers, disabling other devices, giving higher priority to background services, disabling useless services, etc. Nothing is working. I even tried "local" vs "distributed" Threadripper Memory Access Mode, but no go. The absolute lowest latency I see is 6.9ms for 88200 Hz + 512 Buffer Size. Everything above will result crack / pop noise when one Kontakt instrument is loaded.

I've seen such impressive videos where RME HDSPe AIO can go as low as 3~4ms with much more tracks than my default template (single Kontakt 16 channels instance with only one instrument loaded). I have no problem with CPU usage, with 16 cores and 32 logical processors.

I've pushed this CPU by playing games + broadcasting + recording all at the same time, it wouldn't even hit 50% CPU usage. I doubt it's a resource limitation.

Any thoughts?

2

Re: RME HDSPe AIO crackling below 7ms latency

> The absolute lowest latency I see is 6.9ms for 88200 Hz + 512 Buffer Size. Everything above will result crack / pop noise when one Kontakt instrument is loaded.

You mean everything BELOW? 1024 and up work but buffers smaller than 512 do not?

Regards
Matthias Carstens
RME

3 (edited by damoat 2017-11-07 03:00:04)

Re: RME HDSPe AIO crackling below 7ms latency

Sorry for the mistake.
You're right; anything below 512 Buffer Size for 88200 Hz will result in crackling noise. 6.9ms is the absolute lowest my system can handle.

Re: RME HDSPe AIO crackling below 7ms latency

I've tried every BIOS tweak I can think of, still no acceptable result.
Every experienced RME users in other forums are agreeing that HDSPe AIO should go lower than 6.9ms, especially when there's only single Kontakt instrument is loaded.

Is there any optimization for Threadripper is in test? Any investigation going with similar/same hardware setup?

I can invest more time and money in other motherboard or even other sound cards, but I want to get official feedback before taking a next step.

5 (edited by ramses 2017-11-09 09:28:54)

Re: RME HDSPe AIO crackling below 7ms latency

Sorry, no deeper experience with threadripper, its a quite new platform.
My gut feeling tells me to use Intel for recording and not to use ASROCK mainboards.
You could try as an alternative my tested Xeon based platform.

If you compare the passmark mixed benchmark results between threadripper and Xeon E5-1650v4 CPU then you will notice that the quotient between "Passmarks / price" is constant between your threadripper CPU and the E5-1650 CPU.
Ok, you do not get the same performance, but you get 60% of the performance to only 60% of the price.

The good thing would be then for you to get a stable mainboard / platform based on Xeon with ECC memory,
quad channel memory and a very good expandability by many PCIe 3.0/2.0 sockets with many lanes per socket.
You get one x16 socket for 1 GPU, which is sufficient.

You can expand this board nicely with add-on PCIe cards for USB3.1 or a very performance 4xUSB3 4xFL1100 chip solution.

I recommend to run this board using Win7 as there you can still "tame" Windows Update to only install important updates (security updates) instead of having with Win10 big changes which at the end is alway called Win10 (Windows as a service).
Kaspersky internet security 2017 / 2018 runs nicely and doesnt block the system.

With this machine I operated without any issues the following RME products:
- UFX
- UFX and RayDAT
- 2 x UFX+, RayDAT and ADI-2 Pro
The performance is very nice.

Here an overview about the system.
Instead of the E5-1650v3 CPU you could take now the E5-1650v4 and by this you can install quicker ECC RAM.
Everything is optimized, CPU blower, Case blower.

The system operates very silently in an Fractal design case which is pre dampened.
All blowers operate also in summber with 5V.
Only the CPU blower is controller by mainboard the rest by the 5V/9V/12V Switch at the front of the case.

The Nvidia MSI GTX980 4G Gaming is just right, energy efficient and even under games it doesnt become hot, only 53°C.
It supports Sony Vegas for Video editing work.

IDLE temperatures: CPU: 33-35°C, GPU 45°C
LOAD temperatures: CPU: 60-70°C (prime RAM, heat test)  GPU: 53°C (fans start to work over 60°C, so they never blow)

The PSU is superior, it works by a switch in so called hybrid mode, that the blower would only blow, if the load / temperature is high. With my system it never blows. So its also extremely silent.

Case and CPU blowers I optimized for max cooling and lowest noise.

Best cooling you get if you remove the middle block for drives and only put in at max 4 SSD/harddisks.

I use currently one system SSD, one for Recording Projects, one 3TB Harddisk for user Data, one 10TB Harddisk as internal backup disk.

By having added a good USB 3.1 gen. 2 expansion card from Startech I can make backups to an external 4GB Drice at a very good performance, Startech also offers nice external closures for USB 3.1 gen 2.

Components and other infos you find here:
http://www.tonstudio-forum.de/blog/inde … mponenten/

How to optimize the BIOS
http://www.tonstudio-forum.de/blog/inde … -X10SRi-F/

Found an excellent CPU Cooler and Replacement Blower which works silent and excellent with supermicros Blower Control on mainboard:
http://www.tonstudio-forum.de/blog/inde … arrow-ILM/

Better cabling and Blowers lead to very good tempeatures:
http://www.tonstudio-forum.de/blog/inde … al-Design/

Performance Test:
http://www.tonstudio-forum.de/blog/inde … cks-de-en/

Its simply a matter of taste whether you prefer newest CPU/Mainboard or a proven platform which is from performance / price ratio still on par with the newest Threadripper / Intel platforms.

BR Ramses - UFX III, 12Mic, XTC, ADI-2 Pro FS R BE, RayDAT, X10SRi-F, E5-1680v4, Win10Pro22H2, Cub13

Re: RME HDSPe AIO crackling below 7ms latency

I could not find it again, but I remember reading that low latency audio performance of the Zen architecture was not good or even problematic (exactly like yours). Once the buffer settings where high enough performance was very good. Could be the chipset or the cpu itself and of course no ideas yet if it is fixable via bios updates or microcode.

Vincent, Amsterdam
https://soundcloud.com/thesecretworld
Babyface pro fs, HDSP9652+ADI-8AE, HDSP9632

Re: RME HDSPe AIO crackling below 7ms latency

I read in last reviews (Intel vs Threadripper) that Intel is more performant in IPC, but they didnt tell what they mean with IPC. It could eventually be Inter Process Communication.

In other reviews I read, that esp Games have issues with the many cores of threadripper, why its possible to configure another operation mode, which requires a reboot of the machine. Then the amount of cores is limited to the max amount typical games are able to handle.

Whether other (recording) application have this problem I dont know by heart.

I only want to say by this, that AMD threadripper surely is an interesting platform for some of us, but as it doesnt really offer any price benefit with the high end CPUs, I have certain doubts, whether its a good decision to take AMD for recording. I would take Intel.

Another thing in terms of my previous post .. the next Xeons which are comparable to E5-1650v3/4 are Xeon-M, uniprocessor Xeons with high performance ....

I looked at supermicros boards and board layouts for this new socket. I didnt find yet any compareable board to the X10SRi-F. The workstation mainboards have for my taste a too high focus on Multi GPU system (graphic workstation) and I didnt find yet a server board offering at least 1 x16 socket and then severy very good equiped sockets in terms of PCIe lanes.

So ... eventually getting a combination of Xeon E5-1650v4 / X10SRi-F combination would be an interesting thing for you.

If you want thunderbolt, then you need to look into the consumer market.

AMD supports ECC if the mainboard does, Intel not on the consumer CPUs ...

Therefor I regard my setup still as very interesting, even if its 3y "old" .. but dont worry, it performs and as I said, you can get all you usually need by adding it to the PCIe 3.0 sockets with the Lanes coming from CPU.

BR Ramses - UFX III, 12Mic, XTC, ADI-2 Pro FS R BE, RayDAT, X10SRi-F, E5-1680v4, Win10Pro22H2, Cub13

8 (edited by damoat 2017-11-09 18:35:31)

Re: RME HDSPe AIO crackling below 7ms latency

First, ECC doesn't play a any role unless if you're rendering videos for days, or running RAID for servers. My machines is mainly for composing, and rendering for hours.

When I read techreport reviews and gearslutz forum, their DAWBench scores are much better than Intel CPUs, for price/performance balance. Also, no one mentioned such high latency that I'm experiencing. I'm loading ONE particular Kontakt instrument, while many reviews are loading bunch of instruments and effects on 96kHz/64 buffer size, counting polyphony.

One thing you mentioned is what I'm interested to test; motherboard.

I have found extra hardware to test around soon:

- i7-3770k PC
- RME Babyface Pro

With mix-and-match, I may be able to figure out if it's really the AMD vs Intel, motherboard, or even bad optimization of the driver itself for Threadripper platform. So far Threadripper is serving me very well. I can play games, stream in highest 1080p quality while recording in nvenc 60FPS, and CPU still doesn't reach 30% usage. My old i7-3770k PC couldn't even do half of these. Going back in time for both hardware/software just for lower latency means poor driver optimization (motherboard, soundcard, etc) towards new platform, not bad CPU/motherboard design for DAWs.

9 (edited by vinark 2017-11-09 18:43:48)

Re: RME HDSPe AIO crackling below 7ms latency

Have you read this? https://www.steinberg.net/forums/viewto … e0d3172179  It is valid for all DAWs AFAIK

Vincent, Amsterdam
https://soundcloud.com/thesecretworld
Babyface pro fs, HDSP9652+ADI-8AE, HDSP9632

10 (edited by ramses 2017-11-09 19:03:05)

Re: RME HDSPe AIO crackling below 7ms latency

> ECC doesn't play a any role unless if you're rendering videos for days

Companies who sell professional turnkey systems for Audio also deliver Supermicro Xeon / ECC based systems:
http://xi-machines.com/en/application-audio_o.php

I got this tip from somebody in the recording/mastering area who bought a professional DUAL CPU Xeon System from Xi-machines.

ECC is generally good for data integrity and system stability. You never know when or where a bit failure happens.
All is possible from data corrumpation up to a bluescreen. Usually happens seldom, but if it happens then it can be bad.

The selection of HW components in the enterprise area is also more strict, because of SLAs etc.

So if I can get these Enterprise components (Xeon CPU, Supermicro Server Mainboard, ECC RAM) to an acceptable
price, why should I take the "consumer stuff" which is not so much selected or in other words more or less the
"waste" of Enterprice component selection ?! And if you look at prices, the better equipped and more performant
consumer parts (CPU, mainboard) cost also decent money.

I personally prefer to pay for the more stable and professional solution because I had already 1 time issues
with a really bad mainboard. This costed nothing but time, but I learned a lot from it.

> When I read techreport reviews and gearslutz forum, their DAWBench scores are much better than Intel CPUs,
> for price/performance balance. Also, no one mentioned such high latency that I'm experiencing.

I dont know to what information you refer to ... All I am saying that AMD threadripper is for some people a nice platform, but it does not necessarily mean, that it works perfectly out of the box for recording. Or you had also the bad luck to get a bad mainboard like me in the past.

At the end of the day my system is proven and runs perfect since 3y and still is competitive in terms of Performance / Price ratio to threadripper and coffee lake.

BR Ramses - UFX III, 12Mic, XTC, ADI-2 Pro FS R BE, RayDAT, X10SRi-F, E5-1680v4, Win10Pro22H2, Cub13

Re: RME HDSPe AIO crackling below 7ms latency

Again, ECC "can" be useful if you run RAID servers or if you have to render for days. Live broadcast systems probably can be helped too. But as I explained before, my situation is

1. Kontakt, single instrument loaded and makes clicking noise under 6.9ms latency.
2. I use it for composing. I do mixing and mastering but it's my personal home studio.

Your recommendation of systems of ECC is not even close to what I'm explaining and trying to get helped for. You're talking Xeon system which has worked well in your case, while I'm asking for update of investigation from RME with my Threadripper system.

Your idea of "consumer parts suck, go with enterprise level" not only ignores my request of help, it's not even a good advice. I worked as Audio Test Engineer helping DSP engineers at Samsung for several years. I composed logo sound for a company. I've won a very small award on indie game scene. I make more money as SDET now but if I ever came across the situation where I need to build a machine which is needed for live broadcasting or rendering machine meant to run for days after days, I'll remember you, salute your way and say "Thank you ramses for your ECC recommendation!"

And if Xeon with ECC RAMs is the only way to achieve <4ms with 32+ instances, then either we're living in two different worlds, or RME has been very lazy optimizing their drivers. I understand such business decision as it was Intel-dominating world for last 10 years, but now we're living the world where 16 cores cost less than $1000, so blaming everything other than Intel days should be over soon. I thought RME would be front of it, but guess not. We'll see after what my future troubleshooting proves.

Now, back to my problem. The reason why I'm suspecting my Asrock motherboard is that the techreport Threadripper review suggests my PC should be able to load 80~90 INSTANCES in Reaper with 96kHz / 64 samples. The one difference I noticed is that they use different motherboard than I do. This is where I'm agreeing with you ramses, that it CAN be my motherboard. I'll keep it open-minded, and will not factor out motherboard as the problem. But you also have to keep in mind that this can be RME problem as well. I may try Lynx card to see if I get a different result.

Last to add: when I emailed Asrock technical support, they replied with response from R&D word-to-word. They gave me instructions to try different PCIe slots, disable BIOS settings and drivers. Then, what they asked me is a step-by-step guide to what I'm doing to measure the latency issue so they can put effort to reproduce my issue, actually to see if it's on their end. And this was done in less than 24 hours. I'm actually impressed with their response.

Re: RME HDSPe AIO crackling below 7ms latency

You said
> I can invest more time and money in other motherboard or even other sound cards, but I want to get
> official feedback before taking a next step.

I said clearly that I have no experience with threadripper platform but wanted to give you a helping hand
and make a suggestion for the next step, to give you an option.

If you have other ideas, go for it ... but weren't you the guy here in the forum who asked for help ? wink
Good luck !

BR Ramses - UFX III, 12Mic, XTC, ADI-2 Pro FS R BE, RayDAT, X10SRi-F, E5-1680v4, Win10Pro22H2, Cub13

13 (edited by Timur Born 2017-11-10 01:27:56)

Re: RME HDSPe AIO crackling below 7ms latency

Coming back to the original question:

Last time I checked (and remember) I can run audio down to the smallest buffer sizes on my Ryzen 1800X. Tomorrow I will put in a HSDPe AIO and check both Live and Reaper again. I will also check for possible memory frequency = infinity fabric audio buffer differences again.

First I have to reinstall Komplete, though, since I had to reset my W10 installation to make Fall Creators running without BSODs.

What Kontakt preset can I use for testing this? Did you check if your Kontakt instance is even running on multiple cores or maybe only running on a single core within the DAW?

Re: RME HDSPe AIO crackling below 7ms latency

Timur Born wrote:

Coming back to the original question:

Last time I checked (and remember) I can run audio down to the smallest buffer sizes on my Ryzen 1800X. Tomorrow I will put in a HSDPe AIO and check both Live and Reaper again. I will also check for possible memory frequency = infinity fabric audio buffer differences again.

First I have to reinstall Komplete, though, since I had to reset my W10 installation to make Fall Creators running without BSODs.

What Kontakt preset can I use for testing this? Did you check if your Kontakt instance is even running on multiple cores or maybe only running on a single core within the DAW?

Thank you for the help. Hopefully it's not too much trouble. I'm planning to do few different diagnostics tonight so if it's too much trouble, you can always wait and see.

I usually test it with bass instruments, as I can hear the crackling and pops better. I use one patch from Output Substance instrument as one particular one introduces more clicks. I do hear them on all Kontakt VSTis. I played around with core numbers within sequencer and Kontakt itself, Override Instrument's preload size option, but nothing is helping so far.

15 (edited by Timur Born 2017-11-10 13:34:17)

Re: RME HDSPe AIO crackling below 7ms latency

I still need to find the Komplete HD, but here is something to begin with:

https://i.imgur.com/sdcNdgc.jpg

This was at 128 samples and 70% Live CPU counter load. At 32 samples and 35% load I can run about 80 tracks of this specific test.

More importantly, this was at stock CPU and memory settings, the latter of which could be your problem. Communication between the CCX (CPU Core Complexes) happens via the infinity (data) fabric, the performance of which depends largely on your memory frequency settings. At stock settings that communication is a bottleneck, at memory settings above 3000 MT the bottleneck begins to vanish. My Ryzen 1800X uses 2 CCX, your Threadripper uses 4 CCX.

Try running the DAW only on Cores 0-7 by changing its "Affinity" via Windows' Task-Manager. Report back if this makes a difference while I keep searching for my Komplete HD.

Using NVMes can also cause issues on Ryzen, somewhat depending on the mainboard/BIOS. The latter is another likely source of any dropout issues. I am running my 1800X on an Asus Crosshair 6 Hero, which got lots of clever BIOS revisions and direct community support via the Overclock.net forum.

Re: RME HDSPe AIO crackling below 7ms latency

Timur Born, thank you so much for going extra miles to show me your setup. It's awesome that yours is working very well.

So here’s my finding, video included.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-x2FFeIyEQ4

The video has little more explanation on 5 different hardware setup I tested.

The conclusion is that the plugins I wanted to use just needed a whole bigger buffer size in order to make the noise go away. Simple as that. Hint: I love to use Output and Cinesample instruments pretty often.

Here’s what I’ve found:

- This isn’t related to AMD vs Intel: Stupid argument not even worth getting into.
- This isn’t related to audio interface: Unless if M-Audio and RME shares a same bug, I doubt it’s the audio interface issue.
- This isn’t related to cores: I’ve tried disabling cores and threads, none helped.
- This isn’t related to graphic cards: I’ve tried 3 different mixes, with 2 nVidia and 1 intel graphic card.
- This isn’t related to disk / where instruments were installed: I’ve tried both NVMe and SSD with different instrument locations (in and out of the OS drive)
- This isn’t “Windows Optimization” issue. I’ve seen same thing happening on macOS.

The only way to solve my issue is to raise my latency to 12ms for certain plugins which I want to use. Since my new Threadripper can do everything I ever wanted with less than 50% of CPU usage, I’m going to let this minor issue go, while bugging SW devs to see if there’s a better way to deal with this; some kind of separate buffer setting per-VSTi, etc.

Thank you and if anything more interesting comes up, I’ll make sure to update the thread.

Re: RME HDSPe AIO crackling below 7ms latency

Ha, I just found the HD and reinstalled Kontakt this very minute (installer still open in the background). I came here to decide what content libraries are needed for the test. Good to see you got it sorted by yourself and reported back for others to share! wink

Re: RME HDSPe AIO crackling below 7ms latency

ramses wrote:

> ECC doesn't play a any role unless if you're rendering videos for days

I personally prefer to pay for the more stable and professional solution because I had already 1 time issues
with a really bad mainboard. This costed nothing but time, but I learned a lot from it.

In theory server platforms should be more stable. But in practice, I'm not so sure. The reason is that server platforms are rarely used for audio production in the grand scheme of things and are therefore less tested and proven.

Some things to consider:

1. Gamers and DAW users share many of the same performance and reliability concerns: realtime performance/latency, CPU utilization, peripheral/device (PCIe, USB, Video, etc) compatibility/interoperability and stability, affects of power saving modes, etc.

2. Gamers tend to experiment a whole lot more than than regular end users and server platform users, with wide varying types of configurations and parts.

3. Gamers stress their systems to a much higher degree than probably even most business servers (not necessarily enterprise servers).

There's probably more I can add, but for now, the point is: what other platform can a DAW user choose that is more widely tested and proven than a gamer platform, which is a type of system closest to a DAW? There is none.

So, while a server with ECC memory might be able to save your butt because you didn't suffer one blue screen in one year due to a single bit error (or which may have ended up as a tiny glitch on one sample, that wasn't even captured, only played back, at location 29.2.3.101 of track 23, near or about about -81db, which you might end up muting because you don't like that part it anyway), on the other hand, you might loose your butt due to the weekly blue screens or daily clicks and pops caused by an untried and tested combination of parts: audio card/video card/NIC/mobo (not to mention drivers) that were never detected because server data centers can't discover and report problem configurations/parts they don't use.

My $.02.

19

Re: RME HDSPe AIO crackling below 7ms latency

Indeed in the old days the so-called server boards with 'exotic' Intel chipsets were the ones that always made trouble. Things have improved in the last years, though, up to important DPC advantages with such boards and matching processors.

Regards
Matthias Carstens
RME

20 (edited by tech20k 2018-01-20 17:21:15)

Re: RME HDSPe AIO crackling below 7ms latency

MC wrote:

Indeed in the old days the so-called server boards with 'exotic' Intel chipsets were the ones that always made trouble. Things have improved in the last years, though, up to important DPC advantages with such boards and matching processors.

Well that is good to know. I'm always building one server system or another and even though my DAW uses a Gigabyte gamer board, my last two personal workstations are Xeons with ECC RAM. I always use Supermicro (though Tyan offers great boards too). But I have been bitten in the past trying to coerce Supermicro workstation boards into surveillance DVRs, which in the end, worked better using gamer boards.

Next time I build a DAW I will consider using a server/workstation board. However, my main issue with that is overclocking on server boards is as rare as the sun rising in the west. And my first and foremost consideration is low latency with high plugin density per low track density over higher latency with low plugin density per high track density, which means: buy the fasted quad GHz processor money can buy. I'm currently using a 4790K @ 4.6 GHz overclocked (4.3/4.6) and I don't believe there's a Xeon quad core that will outperform this CPU at this GHz. Fastest in terms of GHz is the E5-1630 V4 3.7/4.0 GHz. My 4790K @ 4.6 is 15% faster (in GHz of course). Now throw in ECC memory and suffer a percent or two more perhaps.

21 (edited by tech20k 2018-01-14 17:47:51)

Re: RME HDSPe AIO crackling below 7ms latency

One other negative regarding server boards I should mention is the lack of decent onboard graphics, which becomes crucial as you fill up the PCIe slots.

On a seven slot motherboard with no decent onboard video:

2.5 - RayDATs
1 - NMVe drive
1 - Video card

And that's it.

I think it would great if RME would offer a RayDAT with a breakout box so we can save a PCIe slot per card. This is very important now that we have NMVe drives which take up a PCIe slot.

And not to mention that many of us are starting to use 10 Gig to 56 Gig ethernet or infiniband using one of the various xDR type ports and that is yet another expansion slot to be used. Although many server boards do have 10G copper, that is not a solution I care for, especially with 40/56 Gig options being so cheap, on eBay that is.

22

Re: RME HDSPe AIO crackling below 7ms latency

The RayDAT's Expansion Board is not connected to PCIe at all. In better cases you can find additional openings to mount brackets independent from the motherboard. You could mount the Expansion Board there and keep the PCIe slot free.

Regards
Matthias Carstens
RME