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Technical information on computer specs for Hauptwerk
Part 3: processors
The performance of the processor(s) primarily determines the polyphony that can be achieved in Hauptwerk.
Hauptwerk's basic static polyphony is defined and measured for mono samples, panned into stereo in real-time, and for unenclosed pipes (those not in swell boxes), with all of Hauptwerk's realism features enabled. There are several additional factors within Hauptwerk that affect the polyphony that can be achieved on a given system:
- Using true stereo sample sets decreases the polyphony that can be achieved by about 20 percent. (Note that this differs from Hauptwerk 1, whose 'simulated stereo' mode reduced polyphony.)
- Using pipes enclosed in a virtual swell box decreases the polyphony by about 30 percent due to the additional overheads of the digital filters used in Hauptwerk's swell box model, which are applied to each pipe individually. Note that the swell box model filters can be disabled, leaving just volume adjustment by the virtual swell box.
- Hauptwerk also applies 'harmonic shaping' filters to control the tone of each pipe individually for voicing, tremulants and flow modelling. These can also be disabled, giving approximately a further 30 percent gain in polyphony, although the realism of tremulants will be particularly impaired, and we recommend this only as a last resort.
- You can disable interpolation entirely, giving fixed pitch sample play-back and a loss of some realism, but typically doubling or even tripling the polyphony that can be achieved, and allowing even very large sample sets to be used on older or low-cost computers.
Hauptwerk is specially optimised to be able to take advantage of multi-core processors, multi-processor systems, 64-bit processors and NUMA (non-uniform memory access). 64-bit processors are also a prerequisite (only) if you plan to use more than about 3 GB of memory with Hauptwerk.
The total number of processor cores, memory bandwidth, processor level 2 cache size and the processor core clock speed are the main factors that determine the polyphony that can be achieved with Hauptwerk.
On Windows PCs the audio interface and its drivers can also have a large effect on polyphony. In particular, note that a good basic audio interface and driver (e.g. an E-MU 1212M) can as much as double polyphony over a low-cost sound card in a PC. This is not usually the case on Apple Macs because high-performance audio is built into Mac OS X and there is much less dependency on audio drivers.
Although Hauptwerk can be used effectively on a 1.25 GHz G4 Mac or a PC with a Pentium III or AMD Athlon processor, a system with an Intel Core 2 Duo processor would be the minimum that we would recommend for a new computer, since they are available relatively inexpensively and perform so well with Hauptwerk, even with large organ sample sets. 64-bit processors (such as the Intel Core 2 dual and quad-core range or their Xeon equivalents) also have the potential to be able to access more than 3 GB of memory. On Windows PCs, the AMD Athlon 64 X2 and Opteron processors also work well with Hauptwerk, but, at the time of writing, the Intel Core 2 / Xeon processors out-perform them with Hauptwerk by a very large margin.
For best performance, if you are buying a new computer, we recommend buying one with processors with at least 1 MB of level 2 cache per processor core. The Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 and E6700 models (2.33 and 2.66 GHz) have 4 MB of level 2 cache shared between their two cores, which is good. The more level 2 cache, the better.
The Intel Xeons (54xx series) are the multi-processor equivalents of the Core 2 range, and a dual-processor system using these is ideal for almost the largest conceivable organs with all of Hauptwerk's realism features enabled, including large cathedral organs and very large theatre organs. The Apple Mac Pro is such a computer, which we strongly recommend if you are looking for the ultimate computer to run Hauptwerk.
However, once again we wish to stress that these recommendations are only intended as a guide if you are buying a new computer. Hauptwerk will perform very well indeed with even quite large sample sets (30 ranks or so) on existing computers with a single 2 GHz processor or faster and all realism features enabled, provided that you have sufficient memory for the sample set you wish to use. To emphasize this fact, we recorded some of our audio demos in real-time on a PC with a modest 2.8 GHz Intel Pentium 4 processor.
You can still easily use Hauptwerk on older computers (such as 1 GHz Pentium III PC or 1.25 GHz G4 Mac) with large organs and with excellent results and incredible performance by simply disabling some of the audio realism features such as interpolation and per-pipe filters, of course, at the expense of some realism. With interpolation, per-pipe filters and multiple sample loop playback disabled, Hauptwerk will typically be able to achieve about three times the polyphony than with all features enabled.
The following gives a very rough guide to the approximate static polyphony in simultaneous pipes that can normally be expected with some modern processors, based on our benchmark tests (mono samples panned into stereo, unenclosed pipes, all Hauptwerk features enabled, 12 milliseconds buffer latency).
Apple Macs:
- Apple Mac Pro (2 x 2.66 GHz Intel Xeon dual-core processors), Apple memory, Mac OS X 10.5 'Leopard': 4500-5500.
- Apple iMac (1 x 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor), Apple memory, Mac OS X 10.5 'Leopard': 2000-2500.
- Apple MacBook Pro (1 x 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor), Apple memory, Mac OS X 10.5 'Leopard': 2000-2500.
- Apple PowerMac G4 (2 x 1.25 GHz G4 processors), Apple memory, Mac OS X 10.5 'Leopard': 375-450.
Windows PCs:
- Intel Core 2 Q6600 processor (2.66 GHz, 8 MB shared L2 cache, quad-core), PC5300 ECC DDR2 memory split equally among two memory channels, 64-bit Windows Vista or XP: 5000-6500.
- Intel Core 2 Duo E6700 processor (2.66 GHz, 4 MB shared L2 cache, dual-core), PC5300 ECC DDR2 memory split equally among two memory channels, 64-bit Windows Vista or XP: 3500-4000.
- Intel Core 2 Duo E6700 processor (2.66 GHz, 4 MB shared L2 cache, dual-core), PC5300 ECC DDR2 memory split equally among two memory channels, 32-bit Windows Vista or XP: 2300-3000.
- Two AMD Opteron 275 dual-core processors (2.2 GHz, 1 MB L2 cache per core), PC3200 memory split among all four processor memory channels, 64-bit Windows Vista or XP: 3500-4500.
- Two AMD Opteron 275 dual-core processors (2.2 GHz, 1 MB L2 cache per core), PC3200 memory split among all four processor memory channels, 32-bit Windows Vista or XP: 3000-4000.
- AMD Athlon 64 X2 4400+ dual-core processor (2.2 GHz, 1 MB L2 cache per core), PC3200 memory split equally among two memory channels, 64-bit Windows Vista or XP: 1700-2200.
- AMD Athlon 64 X2 4400+ dual-core processor (2.2 GHz, 1 MB L2 cache per core), PC3200 memory split equally among two memory channels, 32-bit Windows Vista or XP: 1500-2000.
- Intel Pentium 4 2.8 GHz single-core processor with 512 KB of L2 cache, 32-bit Windows Vista or XP: 750-1000.
On Windows PCs, the exact result achieved also depends significantly on the sound/audio interface, its drivers and the motherboard. These benchmarks were made using good basic professional audio interfaces using their native ASIO drivers.
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