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Old 06-09-2021, 10:04 AM   #1
beowulf
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Default Gen3/4 Threadripper.. 64 cores.. useable or waste

As the title says.. I am curious if Reaper will take advantage of 32 to 64 cores on a Threadripper CPU to handle more plugins, more tracks, etc? Or is Reaper limited to not performing any better past 8 or so cores?

Also... does it take advantage of more RAM? If I have 64GB or 128GB.. will that be used as well?

I am thinking large film scores with dozens of tracks and using multiple VSTs in some cases to handle large orchestra scores?

I realize we can bake a track to audio.. but would prefer not to do that if I have the hardware.
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Old 06-09-2021, 10:34 AM   #2
Glennbo
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REAPER utilizes the 8 cores and 16 threads on my Ryzen 3700X very balanced. The screen grab of my thread meter was taken while REAPER was playing back a 94 FX 43 track project with four instances of Kontakt, an instance of Guitar Rig, and Superior Drummer 2 Latin percussion. The activity bounces around, but stays very even. I would expect to see the same kind of results with more cores.
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Old 06-10-2021, 02:12 AM   #3
Held
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I think REAPER uses one thread per track. So you'd need at least twice the amount of tracks than you have cores to fully use the CPU.

I'm also not aware of any RAM limitations. If you're using a lot of sample libraries, it should be all used.

But even if it isn't, Linux uses free RAM to cache opened files from disk, so you'll benefit from more RAM even if REAPER doesn't use it directly.
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Old 06-10-2021, 03:23 PM   #4
PMan
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64 cores is a *lot*.

I've been looking at building an Epyc based machine. I haven't pulled the trigger on the new machine yet, but I'm now looking at the 16 core Threadripper Pro.

That being said, the (old) version 6.0 change log from https://www.reaper.fm/download-old.php says:
* Multiprocessing: auto-detect up to 128 threads
* Multiprocessing: increase anticipative FX hard limit to 128 threads, live FX hard limit to 64 threads

So it looks like from version 6.0 on, Reaper can see and utilize 64 cores/128 threads.

I've read in several places that Intel CPUs are "better" for audio because of the latency that comes from the "chiplet" design of the AMD CPUs. The data cited for those opinions comes from scanproaudio.info. However, the latest tests from 2020 put the AMD chips in a *very* close second to Intel in 1 test, and in the second test (there are only two), AMD kinda blows Intel away. See the details here:
https://www.scanproaudio.info/2020/0...udio-overview/

The chiplet/latency thing is affected by RAM speed. If you are into technical info there is an article here:
https://www.anandtech.com/show/14525...d-epyc-rome/11
that talks about RAM speed affecting Infinity Fablric speed (Infinity Fabric is what the chiplets use to talk to each other). The newer DDR4 3400 RAM speed makes a big difference.
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