Re: [LAU] Video card for audio (silent, low latency etc)

On Mon, 30 Mar 2020, David W. Jones wrote: Yup. That is the way of it. From the wiki above, the Intel Xe will "compete" with Nvidia and AMD, which one would expect would require cooling. But it is still futureware anyway and so not much help. In truth "competitive with" could mean with lowend units but that is unlikely. There are two things to consider, most people use a "lowlatency" kernel rather than a hard real time kernel any more. I have personally found that if care is taken selecting the motherboard, cpu and periferals and care is taken setting the system up and care is taken with running the system, it is possible to have clean and stable audio down to 1ms (jack time 16/2) with a PCI audio card. USB audio is constrained by the USB arcitecture to probably twice that at least anyway. The lowlatency kernels will work fine with most proprietary graphics drivers and the last time I worked with Nouveau I found it to use more CPU, run hotter and have other issues. I don't know if that has changed as I got myself an i5 with on chip GPU and have modest graphic requirements anyway. I chose the i5 for an equal core/thread count over an i7 where I would want to turn hyperthreading off anyway (no multithreading cores eases cooling concerns as well). The second consideration is cooling. Cooling and performance go hand in hand. If you have gotten to the GPU already, I would expect you have already worked through getting a fanless powersupply and a fanless method of cooling the CPU. It is also assumed you are working with a desktop system that has some room in the case. It is unforunate that most mother boards put the highest throughput PCIe slot closest to the CPU, but it may be possible to move it farther away and replace the stock fan/heatsink with something closer to some of the silent CPU cooling options. Yes that means modifying the GPU. Computers are not made for audio or sound studio use, that requires extra work. Low latency to a computer engineer is 30ms not 5ms (read enough of Intel's docs and you will see this). USB audio devices and the USB system: (ok this is not related to cooling) Most modern mother boards have a USB setup that does internal routing and somehow all the USB port on the mother board end up being on the same USB bus. This means that your mouse and your USB audio device end up sharing the same USB bus and the same IRQ ... and so a mouse movement can cause xruns at low latencies. If you have a desktop system... do yourself a favour and install a PCIe USB card for use with your USB audio device (and nothing else). Boost the priority of that card above other things (not just USB) for a better low latency experience. Finally, low latency is not required for a lot of studio uses. External monitoring works very well for most things with a higher latency. Most recording can use 30ms latency or higher just fine. The exceptions are the use of the system as a guitar effects rack or as a soft synth. So recording a keyboard that uses a plugin in the DAW as it's sound source does require lower latency. An external General midi sound generator may be an option for some people. I would also suggest recording with few or no plugins if lower latency is needed and then mixing with higher latency when plugins for effects are needed... all this is common sense. -- Len Ovens www.ovenwerks.net