Disable “Native DSD Processing”.
Tried it. About all I can say is my intel NUC got warmer 
That takes care of the problem but doesn’t that just convert my DSD files to PCM? I’d like to find a system that can play the DSD files (along with convolution filters) as DSD, not converted to PCM. I’m a little surprised that an i7 processor isn’t up to it.
Are you using the option DSD upsampling or the custom option? I use the custom option with upsampling of the PCMs to DSD64 and leave the DSD formats to the default option. This way I can leave the “Native DSD processing” enabled and play DSD files (up to DSD256). Roon automatically downsample the DSD file to DSD64 which is the max for my PS Audio Bridge II.
I noticed that selecting DSD upsampling instead of custom uses more resources and in this case it is just at the limit to play DSD128 (speed 1x) and DSD256 is not working.
Hope this helps.
No, disabling Native DSD Processing is not implying an output as PCM (which is dependent on other settings as well - you can still force the output to become DSD again). It’s about how the DSP works internally for DSD music.
I’m not. That option is not for your use case with convolution.
Try HQPlayer and youre not surprised that i99999 in 2028 will not handle all the filters 
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Would you mind explaining why the native DSD processing is not for use with convolution ? I am using an Intel i5-7500 and the convolution filters seem to work fine with native DSD processing enabled. Thanks.
If it works for you, you may keep it enabled.
It overloads other people’s setup.
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after the processing speed drops below 1.4X you will start to get stuttering and at some point could just stop playing.
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I’m not doing any upsampling at all. As I said in my previous post, the problem is only with NATIVE DSD files.
If I remember correctly, you are playing files Upsampled to DSD, not Native DSD files. For me, the former plays fine, the latter does not.
But GPU offload can help a lot on many things, including convolution… 
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Peter, you have way more technical knowledge than I do but there is a reason for my confusion. The only difference between these two screen captures is Enable Native DSD or not.
One thing I just noticed is that the Native DSD is using convolution filters with 2.2 Million Taps and the setting for Non Native DSD is using 275 Thousand Taps. I have no idea why, I didn't change any other settings.
The reason why is, I believe, explained in danny’s post I linked to above.
If you really like DSD, you can convert the intermediate PCM back to DSD for the final output.
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Thanks for your help.
Native DSD is also working for me. Maybe the convolution filters generated by Home Audio Fidelity are more cpu friendly ??
Thierry @ HAF made my filters.
Sorry. I was just trying to find a potential explanation…
Your i5-7500 CPU single thread rating is 2280, more than 12% faster than @Dave_Richardson i7-4578U CPU with a single thread rating of 2031. The CPU single thread performance is the most important factor to determine Roon DSP performance.
Dave’s signal path also contains additional entries of Volume Levelling and most importantly Parametric EQ. So he’s doing far more DSP on a slower CPU.
To further explain the taps, based on my understanding of danny’s post I think it’s like this:
DSD64 2822400Hz / PCM 352800Hz = 8
So the 275k taps for 352.8kHz (after conversion to PCM) is forced to multiply by 8 = 2198k taps (rounding error) when Roon is forced not to decimate the DSD when Native DSD Processing is enabled.
(By the way, HAF is much more popular than I previously assumed.)
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Thank you very much for the detailed explanation.