scope benchmarks per plugin available for reading?

A place to talk about whatever Scope music/gear related stuff you want.

Moderators: valis, garyb

Post Reply
binez0r
Posts: 45
Joined: Thu Feb 16, 2006 4:00 pm

Post by binez0r »

I would like to know if anyone has done benchmarks purely of stacking the same plugin to see how many can be stacked in a chain (IE, 20 of X reverbs, etc) before toppling the Scope (14) platform. I really like what I've read about scope, but show me what it can do on paper. I have to see NUMBERS before I can make a choice, and the main page seems to lack those.
symbiote
Posts: 781
Joined: Sat May 01, 2004 4:00 pm

Post by symbiote »

check this thread for reverb benchmarks for different systems:

http://www.planetz.com/forums/viewtopic ... orum=19&78

note that this is mostly pci-bandwidth benchmarks. for example, on my system, i can load 12-13 reverbs at the same time before i hit a limit, but that only fills half of my 18 DSPs system (pro + home), and i can keep loading more plugins (that don't use much pci, i.e. synths, compressors, eq, mixers, etc) without issues.

as for more paper stuff, i *think* a 14 DSPs board will clock in at 2.7GFLOPS, which is pretty awesome considering the price. compare with the mykerinos dsp cards, which cost 3000+ euros for 800MFLOPS.

this being said, some of the synths are pretty heavy models, so if you tend to load 2-3 synths set at 16 voices each, you will run into limits fairly quickly. if you know how to work and know where you are going though, you can bounce stuff to audio and/or sample and/or use different tricks for fattening up sounds besides just more voices.

i've had no problems running full projects almost strictly on DSPs, plus you can still use any VST or native application if need be, but you mileage can vary.

if you just want dsp-accelerated plugins though you might find the whole routing thing of the standard SFP mode a bit daunting, so how much you will like/use the system depends on the way you prefer to work.
binez0r
Posts: 45
Joined: Thu Feb 16, 2006 4:00 pm

Post by binez0r »

Hrm, interesting, I guess my next question would be.. is the masterverg a light/medium/or heavy/very heavy computational plugin?
dawman
Posts: 14368
Joined: Sun Jul 24, 2005 4:00 pm
Location: PROJECT WINDOW

Post by dawman »

Symbiote,
You are a good man, thank you.
eliam
Posts: 1093
Joined: Sat Jan 05, 2002 4:00 pm
Location: Montreal, Quebec
Contact:

Post by eliam »

Masterverb is heavy on pci bandwidth, but it is moderately heavy on dsp. Big mod patches are heavy on dsp but not on pci bandwidth. So, as was already said, once you've reached the pci limit, you can still fill the dsps left (if any) with a lot of plug-ins which do not require ram access (synths, comps, eqs, etc.).

Stats on paper can give you an idea of how many plugins you can run, but that is not all the story, for these plug-ins sound awesome! Once you've tasted the quality, versatility and infinite possibilities of this platform, you won't want to part with it but rather add more dsps! I do all my mixes on scope mixers, for I find the summing superior than in cubase SX.

All the best!
symbiote
Posts: 781
Joined: Sat May 01, 2004 4:00 pm

Post by symbiote »

thanks jimmy, i try and do what i can =P

about the specific masterverb question, i'm not acquainted with the innards, and i don't know what you'd consider a light/medium/heavy computational plugin (or how you'd measure it,) but it's a pretty high quality reverb, good enough for mastering jobs and more than good enough for use in mixing, so i'd rate it as fairly heavy. there's a heavier (i.e. more editable parameters) one called masterverb pro, but it's not that much heavier, i can load maybe one instance less than the standard masterverb. there's also the heaviest ones by warp69/sonic timeworks that will munch a fair bit of dsp/pci (there's a pci light version though), but those ones will easily be on par or better than multi-thousand dollars hardware equivalents.

it's kind of hard to evalute this properly without having identical algos to compare, but to give you an idea, i can load 16 voices of the minimax in a minimal setup, and most of the DSPs will be filled. this is probably the most dsp-intense no-comprise (i.e. it's internally oversampled to prevent anti-aliasing, etc) model though, except zarg solaris maybe, and a bit of an overkill (but fun!) the other synths will take anywhere from 3/4 (pro12, protone, prisma) to less than 1/5 (b2003.)

i guess you could try and track a demo of minimonsta or something similar and see how much voices of that you can load natively, but it'll be an imperfect comparison at best since it's not the same algo running on pretty different architectures.

this is with stock configuration though, almost all the synths have editable parameters that can affect dsp-load, i.e. you can turn off some oscillators or on-board effects and a lot of other things that will end up affecting dsp-load, so really hard to evaluate.

this also doesn't factor in the modular stuff, which can be as light or as heavy as possible.
MCCY
Posts: 1208
Joined: Sun Mar 25, 2001 4:00 pm
Location: Germany

Post by MCCY »

Just ask a specific question about a combination of specified modules and I will test it for you. I have no idea in what dimensions your projects are, but one could easily help you, if you could give an example.
Give an example of what can do another solution and one can try to do something similar with scope...

Martin

btw. reverbs is not a very good example, for what scope can do because of limited PCI bandwith. If you'd like to do 20+ reverbs, forget it with scope.
If you'd like to do dozenz of filters, compressors, synths, small delays, which are controllable in very intelligent ways, go for it!


<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: MCCYRANO on 2006-06-18 03:44 ]</font>
Post Reply