I have something strange,… I think. I just installed my new Mac Mini with a powerful M2 cpu and see something strange happening to my eyes. (See screenshot below)
Before I used a Dual core 2.5hgz i5 Mid 2011 Mac Mini and when I use a smal Convolution filter + 2-4 Eq filters this cpu was struggling!
With 24/192khz tracks the Processing speed came down to 15-20x. And sometimes it stopt playing. But, it’s okay because it’s a very old Mac.
But the new M2 does it slightly better. I don’t understand why? Only Roon is running.
I thought the M2 showed nothing in terms of processing speed because it is very fast and shouldn’t have any trouble.
It simply shows the speed, i.e. how far away from the minimum you are. Anything above 1.5x is fine. I use my NUC just with volume leveling and no other DSP. The speed is 100x and it shows it nevertheless
The speed value is a multiplicator showing essentially how much faster the core is than you need it to be.
On Nucleus and ROCK, you can be fine with very close to 1, like 1.2 or even 1.1 might be fine, because RoonOS does barely anything else but running Roon.
On general-purpose OSes like macOS and Windows, which do other tasks in the background as well, it becomes problematic at 1.5 or so
What makes you think it would not show anything. Any convolution is going to have a hit on the cpu. And processing speed is that it’s the speed x real-time so it’s processing it 29.7 x faster than real-time which means you have plenty spare. But this figure isn’t just related to cpu it takes into account network and transport methods, local files will process quicker than Qobuz, speed of disks also plays its part and the OS.
And Roon only uses a single core for DSP so it’s the single core speed that’s important for Roon doesn’t matter how many cores it has it will only use 1 as default and 2 max if you enable Parallelise Sigma Delta Processor but as I mentioned early the whole processing speed is based on other factors and not just CPU.
Actually let me add another “huh”. I am sure I saw for my ROCK in the past the processing speed, showing about 100x. But I seem to remember that not all platforms had it; at the time I was using Windows and Android phone & tablet, can’t remember which one had it.
The NUC is the same but now I don’t see it anywhere, not on macOS, iPad Pro, Android tablet, nor Android phone. I am using earlyaccess though. Does everyone else see it in regular production or earlyaccess versions?
Maybe obvious, but if you’re not doing any “processing” (i.e., your settings allow the sound to flow straight through the system with no upsampling, EQ, etc.), you won’t see the processing speed indicator, either.
I use volume leveling, so some mild form of DSP, and never used anything else. Yet I am sure that I saw the (high) multiplier once and now I don’t. Doesn’t really matter, just curious
100 or above it doesn’t show, below 100 it shows. Volume levelling isn’t a hugely taxing process so won’t really show up unless your cores a pretty low spec Atom or something similar.
My headphone eq convolution filters don’t drop the processing speed enough either. All depends on what your doing.
