Some First Impressions

As an aside, given the shift to a more visual approach to audio (some iZotope plugins also come to mind), I think some thought will have to be given to graphics performance when looking at specs for new PCs for audio. I’ve steered away from powerful graphics cards because IMHO their drivers are optimised for gaming, with little thought given to audio priority. Still happy with the on-bard Intel 520 graphics here for the moment, though that may have to change!

Along similar lines, I wonder how much interest there is in enabling DAW code and especially plug-ins to use the GPUs. Many of us have vastly more raw compute power on our GPUs than CPUs. Some video editor programs use GPUs aggressively.

Thanks Robin. Despite the glitches, your responsiveness has made me a LOT more confident with the product. I look forward to the next minor update (and, frankly, some more useful docs but that’s another story… :smiley: )

Cheers!

Sorry to be a nag, but would THIS THING do the trick? I ask because I found one for $20. I don’t want to put any money into the DAW until I need to replace the entire rig.

I wouldn’t recommend it : it’s very outdated (only support DX10), and very slow (even when it was released back in 2007, it was already a slow GPU). Not worth the $20.
I’d still recommend either an used Geforce 720 GT (32$) or a Radeon HD 7xxx (such as this used Radeon HD 7570 for 26$). Or basically, any GPU that support DirectX12 minimum, and no older than 2012.

You da man.

I appreciate the help. I have been completely in the dark as to what level of video to go for with Cubase. My understanding was that higher graphics were irrelevant for Cubase or WL. Having this detail is -very- useful in knowing what I really need to be thinking about.

One final question: So do the newer CPUs support the latest DX level or is it always the better bet to get a cheap external card such as those you recommended?

—JC

It’s a bit less relevant for Cubase and WL which (AFAIK) don’t take that much advantage from GPUs. However Nuendo has video decoding capabilities, for instance.
Yes, newer CPUs have better graphic support (they all support DX12 now). Both Intel and AMD provide decent graphic capabilities with their CPUs nowadays (2016 and newer are safe in term of graphic capabilities).

Got it. Just trying to figure out whether to put $40 into a card or save for the next DAW. I’m cheap like that. :smiley:

The laptop in your sig has an i5 with DirectX 12 compatible GPU built in?

Ha, while being on the road I read this thread. Now, back to Cubase, I also have the blank GUI inside of Cubase! I swear it has worked before.

What’s happening? I have a GForce GT730 installed and also updated the drivers. Stays blank…

Can you send me all the log files you have in %LOCALAPPDATA%\Steinberg\SpectraLayers Pro\logs ? There might be some graphic rendering errors shown there that could help identify the issue. Did the issue started appearing before you updated the graphic drivers ?
Does it fix the issue if you switch to OpenGL and restart ? If so, also please send me the new log files after switching to OpenGL.
You can send the log file to contact [at] divideframe.com, or in PM.

It happened before updating drivers, actually updated to eventually fix it. How do I switch to OPEN GL?

Edit > Preferences > Display > Rendering API. This need a full restart of SL/Cubase.

Ah, ok! I’ve been looking for it in Windows setting…

It’s working with Open GL, display is back! :slight_smile:

Well, my point was that the GPU hardware can be seen as a general purpose massively parallel compute engine. DX12 is a software stack that utilizes the GPU for graphical operations. But I believe audio processing could be parallelized in a similar way. I am not aware of a software stack that makes this convenient for developers. It is natural that video got Nvidia’s attention. Video is a much bigger market and opportunity. Nonetheless, I’d like to think that eventually the audio world will find a way to utilize this massive compute power.

Here are some interesting references to that:

https://www.gearslutz.com/board/music-computers/1130943-why-cant-gpu-power-used-daw-plugins.html

The short version of the story seems to be that lots of people report improved DAW performance when upgrading their video card, but that is almost entirely from offloading video processing from the CPU and better memory access, making more CPU and memory access available to the DAW and plug-ins. There was evidently one effort to parallelize a convolution reverb with limited success.

It should be noted that many of the plug-ins use very elaborate GUIs now, and that may benefit from an upgraded GPU, even if the GPU isn’t doing anything for the audio processing.

When will there be more videos or tutorials that have actual audio examples in them? When is the first update coming? I am excited about the idea of this but would really like some good examples and tutorials on how to get the most out of the software :slight_smile:.

First update next week, and example videos in the making.

Thank you, Robin!

SL update 6.0.10 sees improvements in the selection (no more lagging when many selections are made).

How are the example videos progressing please? Will they be available well before the introductory offer finishes?

Thanks