Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[sdawson]

Running Media Center 10.0.155 on winxp pro sp1. I have an M-Audio Transit USB attached to an IBM Thinkpad laptop. I find that if I use the onboard Soundmax audio, CPU utilization when playing a track is around 10-20%. If I use the Transit via wave drivers, it gets to 25-35%, and if I tell Media Center to use the Transit ASIO drivers, it goes right up to 35-45%, which is getting kind of high.

Anyone know what this is all a function of? I presume that since the audio is being piped via USB when using the Transit device, you can expect the CPU utilization to get higher than using the motherboard's audio, but it seems quite a hike. And then using ASIO drivers borders on the unacceptable. Would this be Media Center's ASIO interface, or M-Audio's ASIO drivers?

Thanks.

[Alex B]

That is high. How fast CPU you have? What settings you have in MC's DSP Studio?

My CPU usage seems to be 2-5 % with ASIO. (Terratec DMX 6 fire PCI sound card / P4 2,8 GHz desktop).

[sdawson]

The CPU is a P4 Mobile (not the newer "M") 1.8Ghz. My background CPU utilization tends to be anything up to 5%, since I do tend to run a lot of background stuff.

On another machine with a 2.5GHz cpu, ASIO playback uses about 10-13%, and not using ASIO about 5-10%. I think the Transit, being a USB device, must inherently use more CPU than, say, a PCI card. But ASIO does seem to add quite an extra overhead, and I'm wondering whether this might be attributable to the MC ASIO code or the Transit ASIO drivers.

Thanks very much for sharing all your experiences!

[Veazer]

This might help:
http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?board=3;action=display;threadid=23979

[sdawson]

Unfortunately, I'm talking about load when plugged into AC power, so I don't think any processor throttling comes into it. I did try changing the scheme to "always on" to be sure, and it didn't make any difference. Thanks for the thought though!

[Veazer]

I'm not sure what's going on then.  ? I'm using an older version, maybe cpu use has gone up.

Is it any less if MC is minimized?

[sdawson]

No, minimizing doesn't seem to make any difference.

[sdawson]

I just found out that CPU utilization is a much more respectable 15-20% with my Transit USB plugged straight into my Thinkpad's own USB port rather than via an Adaptec USB2/Firewire PC card I use to get USB2 support. I guess the PC card interface must add a lot of overhead.

[JaredH]

Thanks for the reply to the other post Veazer. I couldnt find the post so I thought maybe I had imagine the whole posting scenario.

I would like to add that I always keep my lappy set on "Always On". I actually use the Dell QuickSet program as opposed to the windows power management. I always keep it set on "Maximum Performance" when I'm plugged in, which is most of the time.

To add to the previous post you answered. My CPU usage for MC with the latest build has been averaging around 20%, and thats just with the program sitting still playing an MP3 with no vizualizations or image slideshows. It doesnt really make sense.

Minimizing doesnt make a whole lot of difference. Only about 1% or 2%.

One thing I have noticed is that with these Pentium M processors regardless of whether you are on "Maximum Performance" or "Always On", the CPU still downthrottles during low usage.

[sdawson]

How do you confirm that the CPU throttles down even on these high performance power settings?

[Veazer]

Jared, give this a try and see if it can stop the downthrottling:

http://www.diefer.de/speedswitchxp/

I know there are some downthrottling issues with Dells however. They are discussed on the above site.

[JimH]

Jared,
I removed your comment from the MC 11 bug thread.  Better covered here.

Jim

[JaredH]

No prob Jim, thanks for the heads up. Problems been solved anyway thanks to Veazer.

I downloaded that program and replaced my QuickSet app. That did the trick. MC is now bouncing between 0% - 5%, but staying closer to the 1% mark. After setting the processor to full throttle manually, it worked like a charm.

Thanks again Veazer.

[Veazer]

No problem. Glad I could help.

You'll probably notice that XP is a bit more responsive when running the processor locked at full power, but it will run hotter and of course drain batteries like crazy. If you don't need the extra boost, I would let it run in the default "self-adjusting" mode. IMHO, I would base your decision on whether or not the computer is fast enough for you, not what task manager is telling you.

[JaredH]

Well, I decided that since Im plugged in most of the time to lock the processor for AC power and changed it to dynamic switching for DC power. That way I get the better part of 4 hours out of my battery when going mobile. I dont do too much intensive stuff when mobile anyway, so it works out.

[Alex B]

FYI: I just installed ASIO4ALL driver and the CPU usage didn't change. It is the same 2-5% as with the Terratec ASIO driver.

[sdawson]

I tried ASIO4ALL too, and found that CPU utlilization was the same as with the M-Audio driver. I'm sure mine's higher than "normal" because of the USB nature of the sound card.

Did find, though, that I have to enable the "force 16 bit" option in ASIO4ALL to get it to work. Also that upsampling in MC works with the ASIO4ALL driver (after UNchecking the force 16-bit option), whereas it doesn't using the M-Audio ASIO driver. I mentioned this problem in another thread. Looks like there's some sort of incompatibility between MC's ASIO support and M-Audio's ASIO driver.