Is this too much CPU utilization ?
I am using HQ player and Dsd 256 conversion.
What is the CPU?
It’s a custom built 8 core Ryzen 7 processor with a mini ATX motherboard
I suppose the right answer is there is no such thing as too much when upsampling to DSD. It is known to be heavy on CPU use, especially using some of the filter options in HQPlayer. The main priority is cooling. If you can dissipate the heat produced you should be fine.
Is Roon analysing music ? Are you running any other programs besides Roon and HQ Player ?
What filter and modulator are you using in HQ Player ?
I have a Win 10 Intel i7-7700 music server that only runs Roon, HQP and monitoring software. This is my CPU and CUDA usage upsampling Qobuz 44.1 kHz and 192 kHZ streaming source material to 256 DSD with ext2 and EC modulator and convolving a room treatment WAV in HQP:
I am not sure if Roon is analyzing music. How do I check that? I am only running Roon core and hq player server on that server. Euphony is the OS.
Here are the hqplayer settings. Please note I had DSD256 on when I got that cpu utilization
When Roon is analysing music there is a rotating icon in the top right. Clicking on it brings up a window showing progress. If you don’t see the rotating icon, Roon is not analysing. There are settings to throttle analysis while you play or to allocate cores to it on demand in Settings/Library.
I don’t have any experience of Euphony sorry, so can’t help there.
It might be interesting to install Windows or MacOS on a partition of your system drive and see if that makes a difference.
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That looks like a pretty extreme setup at high DSD rates. Euphony is irrelevant here, and if this is not a brand new build, as in the last few hours so is background analysis in Roon. This is entirely about using extreme filters and taps in HQP that would push any processor quite hard.
I just want to double what Henry said, You are running HQPlayer on hardware which is not going to support that level of processing. Using the heavier processing filters requires either a bigger/badder CPU and equal cooling and/or an NVIDIA Graphics card that you can then offload some of the processing onto (that’s the cuda checkbox).
I know that for my i7 9700k, I have to offload to my NVIDIA card to reach some of the items I want to without stuttering. And that is with a target of DSD 256. Any higher, and I’d need much more hardware. Especially after listening to the EC variants. They are so much better, and more processor intensive.
It is hard to say, because at least I don’t know how those Euphony things map to actual HQPlayer settings, because they’ve renamed things. Things shown by Roon are more useful because they are actually how HQPlayer calls things.
Here it looks like regular ASDM7 modulator, not sure which filter variant is in question here. But for example my passive cooled i5-7600T (low 35W TDP model) can do DSD512 with poly-sinc-ext2 + ASDM7 without problems. EC modulators are different story.
My processor is an AMD 2700 8-core processor, honestly when I bought it I thought it was better than the i7 lol. May be it isnt.
I also have a Nvidea GPU that came with it, but I left it disconnected thinking it will use up CPU processing which can otherwise be used for my audio. Am I wrong? Should I plug in the GPU?
What kind of GPU model is it? GPU won’t help on modulators, but it can help on filters. And sometimes help CPU reach higher boosts for fewer cores because other tasks are offload to GPU.
Its a GEFORCE GT710
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OK, that is not very useful for anything else than basic display output.
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That CPU is just a little below my i7-9700k in terms of horsepower, but should be able to handle things. And, I have to offload onto my NVIDIA 1070ti to get some of the filters to play without stuttering, especially the EC ones which I think sound fantastic.
So, yes, I say plug that nvidia back in, enable CUDA and then check to see.
thanks. any suggestion for somerthing that I can add to improve the processing power without having to change the processor? Any specific GPUs?
First starting point is to know what settings you want to run. With filters like sinc-M/S or closed-form, GPUs can make big difference. With poly-sinc filters too, but you need more powerful GPU for it to make as much difference.
Second point is what software configuration is needed to support that. I don’t know if Euphony supports CUDA offload. IOW, there is not much point in adding GPU if it doesn’t work with the software.
So before running to a shop it is important to gather the requirements and figure out what is needed. Or if it can be achieved with the current hardware.
Since software and OS systems are complex, for reference comparisons with just CPU (no GPU supported) would be to boot HQPlayer OS and run a case on it and see how it performs. You can then switch to something else like Euphony and see if the performance is same/better/worse.
Thanks for the explanation. You are right, gathering info first and then choosing the processor is the right way to go, but I ended up buying a used server from audiophylestyle, and then installed HQ Player on it. You are right , I went backwards, but now just trying to see how to do best with what I have.
If I need some more info (for my personal understanding) of the diff types of filters, how they work etc, I mean which processes happen where etc), where do I look? What is CUDA?
CUDA stands for Compute Unified Device Architecture, and is an extension of the C programming language and was created by nVidia. Using CUDA allows the programmer to take advantage of the massive parallel computing power of an nVidia graphics card in order to do general purpose computation.
From http://supercomputingblog.com/cuda/what-is-cuda-an-introduction/
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