Buzz Benchmark

[onecircles]

I just poured some more money into my computer, and I've finally gotten a respectable cooler so I'm starting to overclock, all with the intention of making my computer a better musical instrument. In the past, the methodology of stress testing your pc was to use a synthetic benchmark like intel burn test/linpack to push the cpu to it's absolute limits, but although these tests are still useful in varying degrees for determining stability, it seems more people are turning to real world benchmarks that test the cpu using the programs that will stress it in the way it will be stressed by the tasks you intend use it for!

I once encountered a proposed audio oriented benchmark using reaper and heaping it full of oscillators and samples and things, but I don't use reaper.

So I'd like to test my cpu for audio fidelity and stability and find the limits of what I'm going to be able to do in buzz using this machine of mine using a buzz benchmark.

So here's my question for all of you.

How should this benchmark be constructed? It needs to use many cpu intensive, but rock solid synths, should likely incorporate pvst, since we all use that and should probably be in the form of some kind of song so we can test machines becoming active and inactive (a failure point in my experience).

If we get a semi-standard bmx of this floating around it would be fun to compare results, possibly with audio samples. Another fun thing about it is that if there's any machine that you can't live without, you can put 10^10 of them in there and see what happens for you %D

Off the top of my head I just want to get eleventy-billions of Jacinths going into eleventy-billion Urani and then play it with an hd 2p spec filter~!

[mcbpete]

Here's a test you can do with just one single PVSTi: Try running a preset of lush pad in Diva using its 'Divine' playback mode - http://www.u-he.com/cms/diva

So how many notes polyphony you can play before it starts crackling

[onecircles]

Ooo fun! I haven't got a lush pad in here though...

I don't own this synth, where do I find that preset.

This isnt' quite what I had in mind though. I want to tax not only the cpu but buzz itself, but that has to do with the fact that I've been wanting to know lately how stable buzz is in itself. I want a list of all the known stable and unstable machines. Especially as I get ready to start incorporating this into my live performance.

[onecircles]

So far the only way I was able to get it to crackle was by running my card at 196khz and playing a lot of notes at once. My card is supposed to be able to do 196, but it never actually works. It usually will crash even using a normal synth. It was cool to see my temps go up and my cpu go to 50% though.

At 96khz I can't make it crackle with any of the presets iv'e tried. I'm at divine accuracy, stack 6, voices 16, multicore mode on and mode set to poly or poly 2.

This is on a 4770k i7 at 3.5 ghz. I probably will get 4ghz with the stock cooler but I haven't tried yet. Yesterday I took out the closed loop cooler I bought because it was too noisy. Zalman lq 310 in case anyone is interested. Very noisy pump no matter how I tried to move whatever bubbles might have been in there into the radiator.

[onecircles]

I also wasn't actually running it within buzz, but rather from cantabile 64.

Jacinth did it though. It only took 3 jacinths all maxed out to start making my computer cry. I'm going to redo this more carefully. If this ever were to catch on we'd have to standardize our engine settings too. we should all run at the same sample rate and bit depth and with the buffers set up the same, same latency, etc. Also, I'm currently using wdm kernel streaming. It's always seemed to act better with my card than asio.

[mcbpete]

Ooo fun! I haven't got a lush pad in here though...

I don't own this synth, where do I find that preset.

The fully functional demo is on the right of that page I linked to and should come with all the factory presets. Once installed go to the 'patches' tab and go to Local -> Dream Synth -> BS Deep Space Diva. Under 'accuracy' (should be just above the tabs at the bottom) select 'Divine'. I can manage 8 simultaneous channels using Buzz PVSTi before things get super choppy

EDIT: Strike that - I can get 8 notes polyphony if I add one note at a time, but if I create a 16 note loop pattern and just keep looping it, I can only get 4 notes polyphony before 100%-ing out the Buzz CPU meter !

Try it yourself, it should have the preset pre selected - http://www.ilovecubus.co.uk/pete/buzz_diva.bmx