I installed the latest Studio One and Spire on my old i3-2350m 2.30Ghz Acer laptop and my new 2.2GHz quad-core Intel Core i7 processor (Turbo Boost up to 3.4GHz)Mbp mid 2014 and selected the same patch in Spire on them both with the same chord progression and the cpu was 50% on the i3 and between 47 to 50% on the Mbp based on studio ones cpu meter.
The mac is running Yosemite and the acer is running Windows 8.1.

Screenshot of Windows i3

Screenshot of Mac i7 Cpu

It looks like windows is bit higher in screenshot (Not by much) but thats because it went up when i used a 3rd party screen shot software. Says the mac is in 89% idle, i don't understand?

 

I am reading that right 12% for the WindowServer ( equivalent to Explorer.exe) that is beyond moronic.

Explorer.exe does not even need to be running for Windows 7 or 8 to function and only takes 32 megs of ram NOT friken 12% of it or CPU!!.
You fall back to running everything only from the task manager, this is how I run my daw NO EXPLORER.exe running. I use BBLEAN as the shell (alike to OS X).

The issue is there are 2 Window managers running in Yosemite and you need to read this post ... seems like you are not the only one having this high CPU issue with the Windowserver daemon.

first hit on google with the WindowServer daemon ( which was my theory when I seen your picture posted)

http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/153397/windowserver-high-cpu-on-yosemite

As you can see you are not the only one, notice the answers there deal with graphical issues eating up the CPU.

Please read those posts..

And get back to us here and see if something changed...

 

You test with one track... most of the time realtime audio is hard to paralise (spread out over multiple cpus / cores). But running multiple tracks of effects on multiple cores is 'easy'.

So you'd see more gain from an i7 with multiple cores if you up the track count.

[offtopic]I don't know what Dan is getting with explorer.exe? WindowServer on MacOS is not really the equivalent to explorer.exe on Windows. Far from. WindowServer is kinda the equivalent of the 'desktop window manager' on Windows Vista and up, and yes, when a plugin is doing heavy drawing on a screen with Direct3D / OpenGL you will see dwm.exe rise in cpu also. Finder is the explorer.exe equivalent as far as I know, the file browser.[/offtopic]

Anyway, don't forget that Mac is terrible on CPU performance when you have a very short buffer size when compared to (most) Windows things. When you compare DAW for DAW on the same machine (so you take a Mac, take a multi-os DAW like Reaper or Studio One, you do a test on the Mac with the mac-osx-version, then install Windows on that same machine and do the same test on the Windows version) it's Windows that performs best in low-latency situations, with very short buffer sizes, then they are mostly the same around the 512 buffer size, and from 1024 and upwards Mac OS can take the lead slightly. This has been the trend in DawBench for years.

So you are comparing a Windows i3 laptop with a Mac i7 laptop, you're comparing apples to oranges. The os performs differently, although it's both StudioOne the core of the DAW is different on the OS so yeah, you see differences.
And, never use the cpu meter / performance meter in a DAW, it's mostly rubbish.. In all of them. Just use your OS task manager and see how much you have left.
Or better yet, try duplicating this track till you start to hear the audio stutter or hear artifacts. That's the limit of your system. See how many tracks your i3 can run and your i7 can run. Your i7 _should_ be able to run with way more tracks, whatever the StudioOne cpu meter says. If it's not, then sorry, but Mac OS is really bad then :S. But like I said, Mac Os likes a bit more audio buffer / latency to let the CPU work OK.

 

Pay attention to the Laptop running Windows ) explorer.exe and look at it's resource usage.
That MBP is using 12% of the ram for non essential audio work.

The link I posted is a big issue and has been discussed already as it deals with YOSEMITES WindowServer daemon taking up the CPU too high.


OSX , Linux, Windows, Amiga etc on Daw work, it's nothing running except the Daw.

No fancy gui nonsense, no antivirus ( set to disabled), no firewall nonsense.

Basically you want nothing hogging up the cpu or even spiking the cpu.

That is I run my Daw computer, from live to back home no crashes ever. I use an MSI laptop and a Desktop for live work, and bring those back into the home ( el cheapo diy man cave studio)

Use those 2 with a Yamaha 01v96i and Love the Daw control from the Yamaha 01v96i.

 

Yes, it's likely usage for single core. You can verify it with Task Manager. *yes*

 

That was the problem, thanks alot guys

 

Will check this out as well dan as every little bit of cpu helps, thanks

 

Yay!

 

Dat

I'm used to see OSX Live 9 cpu meter show >100% usage on a quadcore.
So to make it simple if it say 150%, it's probably using 100% of a core and 50% of another (or whatever the way it distribute load on cores/threads).

 

Really? I thought Macs are like PCs (with same hardware) only slightly modded to run OSX and 4 times more expensive. You can't run Windows on them?
I honestly do not know, never had one.

Hackintosh is probably the answer, but correct - no EASY/FAST way to do it.

 

Unfortunately, those of us who had £$€ constraints, hence no Mac, bought an AMD processor which appears to be Hackintosh phobic!

No EASY/FAST way is right.

 

The machine running Windows here is a native windows machine, not the MBP.

And what do you mean by 'was not coded for running on a MBP but emulating it'? If people run Windows on a mac these days (as I said, IF, not the case here) they install it native as dual boot. You really boot windows, there is no emulation for the programs or what so ever. The only thing that is 'emulated' is the boot loader. The moment you see the windows logo starting up -> everything native. Just a FYI.

 

Personaly and to a higher standard of being in control all My Daw PC's or Laptops always have bblean shell installed.

It runs around 5 megs of ram that's it.

The beauty of Bblean ( on windows that is) is that it acts as a standalone shell and only calls Explorer.exe if you explore so Explorer.exe is never running.

What this means is simply you have a full blown shell running 5 megs of ram and includes Windows Spaces, so you can have some apps on this Window and some apps running on another virtual window.

That is why I run it, gives me access to everything on my PC and NO EXPLORER.EXE running.


Again it's a personal choice, but when running a Daw Bblean is what is running and the Daw nothing else.


I have MIDIOX running with Virtual midi ports on one Desktop window and Studio One running on another Space. Midiox is the control centre for all the midi which is then sent to Studio One.

I like this setup so much that the Desktop and Laptop are mirrored with this setup.

 

Dunno if it still works, but you can replace the Windows desktop with any exe. So replace it with Ableton or something and nothing else will run, you won't have any shell at all, just one full-screen app.

I've been thinking for a while now that maybe a PC can be turned into a true audio workstation that only runs the needed audio apps and nothing else. Like a pure VST host running on the Windows or OS X kernel (for compatibility with the most VSTs). One problem is *$%&!*%! copy protection on many commercial VSTs wouldn't run because they require certain Windows resources like the registry.