• Registered: 2014-10-25
  • Posts: 6

Topic: Multiple ASIO chips to cure latency issues

Will RME ever produce a sound device that has multiple ASIO chips?

These days alot of people use ASIO to run their studios but at some point latency becomes a problem, this could be less of a problem if the device had multiple ASIO chips so that you could run a number of DAWs in parallel and run channels between them at low latency.

The trouble with the current RME driver is that any DAWs running are all on the same chip so they all contribute to highering the latency.

Modern processors are designed to run multiple parallel processes at the same time, but all audio software only uses the power of one of the cores effectively and the rest get wasted, for instance i can run pretty much any daw at full capacity but the cpu's (Xeon) are running at around 10%, which means i could run another 8 or so programs at the same time and still have head room, but sadly only having one ASIO chip makes this impossible.

UAD have multiple cores for their own FX, why not multiple ASIO.

I would throw money at a card that can do this effectively.

Any thoughts on this anyone?

2 Reply by MC

  • MC
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  • From: Germany/Thailand
  • Registered: 2007-04-06
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Re: Multiple ASIO chips to cure latency issues

As an example: your idea could be easily built up by using mutliple and different interfaces. Result: it all gets much worse.

The reason one often sees the ASIO load on one core only is that spreading this to several cores would cause real-time problems, with much higher latency settings needed to stay click-free.

Regards
Matthias Carstens
RME

MC's Website

3 Reply by quasimojo (edited by quasimojo 2018-01-18 12:49:01)

  • Registered: 2014-10-25
  • Posts: 6

Re: Multiple ASIO chips to cure latency issues

MC wrote:

As an example: your idea could be easily built up by using mutliple and different interfaces. Result: it all gets much worse.

The reason one often sees the ASIO load on one core only is that spreading this to several cores would cause real-time problems, with much higher latency settings needed to stay click-free.

I do use multiple interfaces and can get low latency input to a heavily laden project to record with low latency from a parallel process set to low latency, so i know for a fact it can work. but it would be a lot better if i could use one interface and RME's zero latency routing mixer.

I have a UFX and as a lot of people i don't need its many ins and outs and multitude of other options, i just need much better asio and i think some kind of interface for people that are mainly using asio with multiple chips in and a redesigned mixer to take this into account would be the holy grail for many producers.

Cheers

4 Reply by MC

  • MC
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Re: Multiple ASIO chips to cure latency issues

You are still knocking at the wrong door. Such changes in ASIO need a different ASIO spec and different software using that spec. Then one could think about supporting this in hardware.

Regards
Matthias Carstens
RME

MC's Website