| jasonf@thei.net wrote:
> First of all, I'm looking into getting a new computer and upgrading another.
> The new computer is going to be a mobile PII 300 notebook and I'm upgrading my
> old one to a dual 450 Xeon system (if I ever get paid). What kind of realtime
> performance can I expect from these two systems? I was told that there's a
> benchmark page somewhere, but I've never been able to find it.
I don't have any solid answers for you, but hopefully I can help you to
make an educated guess about what to expect.
I have a non-realtime benchmark page at:
http://members.tripod.com/~slinkP/pw_linux/csbench.html
...but that doesn't really answer your questions. There are no
dual-processor systems tested, no Pentiums above 233 MHz, and no one has
proposed a meaningful platform-independent way to benchmark realtime
performance.
For realtime testing, I do have some really simple and not very good
code that I used a while ago to compare two different versions of csound
on my linux system: it pipes a steadily increasing number of score
events to csound in realtime, so you can see how many simple oscillators
you can pile on before the output glitches. I could dig up my old
messages about that if you're interested. I got the idea from the
benchmarks posted on the (RT)cmix page at:
http://www.panix.com/~topper/Cmix/benchmarks.html
As for quad cards ... I have no idea, sorry.
> BTW, someone mentioned (I believe it was Philip) that there's a free soundcard
> driver project. What's the URL again?
There are a couple of alternative free drivers for Linux in progress.
One is ALSA, which has a website at:
http://alsa.jcu.cz/
This is of interest to Csounders because, to quote from Dave Phillips'
indispensible Linux Midi & Sound Applications page at
http://www.bright.net/~dlphilp/linux_soundapps.html :
"The latest version of Linux Csound now contains all of Gabriel
Maldonado's wonderful MIDI and other realtime opcodes. Even better, it
now includes direct support for the ALSA API, which should
enhance many aspects of realtime multiplexed I/O."
I can't actually say whether this gives practical results *right now*.
ALSA is in heavy development and I haven't paid attention to their
multichannel support plans. Stereo sound does work nicely with my Turtle
Beach Malibu. One thing to note is that ALSA currently has only very
basic raw MIDI support; sequencing is not implemented. So I believe that
the cool Maldonado stuff and the cool ALSA stuff will not work at the
same time.
The other linux driver project is Guenter Geiger's "High End Sound
Driver" at http://iem.mhsg.ac.at/~geiger/high.html
but I really don't know much about it.
There's information on a number of specific soundcards at Dave's site
mentioned above, but at a glance I didn't notice anything about quad
cards.
As for your other questions... I only just got a keyboard and haven't
had time to try the csound midi support yet!
Good luck,
|