Sevenfeet

HQPlayer 5 Desktop won't launch on my ancient Mac Pro 3,1 with OLCP running Ventura 13.3.1. I'm suspecting the code is probably built for AVX2 exclusively. Oh well, at least I have other newer machines.

This indeed may be what's happening. One of the things i had to do was install controllers for yokes, flight sticks and other controls. many of them are old drivers...I can't guarantee that any of them aren't having small problems in this rig. Regardless, I deliver the machine today so this performance exercise for me is over.

OK, I'm seeing no appreciable change. Playing sinc-LI w/ASDM7ECv2 @ 44.1/512 on this extreme rig still has the occasional dropoff playing Redbook content. It's not often....sometimes i can play an entire song without issue. And other time there is a drop off of a few seconds during a song....usually only once though. Weird.

It shouldn't be necessary but I'm going to try it. And yes, I had previously set Windows 11 to "Best Performance". One thing I did notice when I disable Speedstep and Speedshift was that the the ASUS utility now shows all the cores locked in at maximum speed and the central CPU clock is now unwavering from the overclocked setting (5.0 Ghz). Interesting. Before hand the CPUs regularly shifted up and down depending on load. I'm going to try it now and see if it makes a difference.

Sounds like doing a custom Linux install. Probably too much trouble since the machine is pretty much ready for delivery to my friend. Bluetooth and Wifi are active but the main network I'm running is wired. The CPU is pretty much loafing through all of this, barely ticking 3% utilization since everything is going to the 4090.

That's pretty much what I've done regarding settings. I use Game Ready drivers since the machine's main purpose is a flight simulator. And I run fans quiet since there are 9 intake fans (including 3 for the CPU water cooler). So the machine stays well within tolerances. Bios was flashed when I assembled the machine...I try not to forget things like that, especially on new hardware. Nothing on this machine has been around very long in terms of being a shipping product. I do keep manufacturer utilities, mainly for fan control and other features. Generally a loss of a frame or two in a flight sim isn't anything to worry about. But I imagine it could make a difference with a high GPU workhorse application like HQPlayer. is there a quick way to try HQPLayer Embedded to see if that makes any difference? (a USB stick maybe) I've been listening to Sinc-LI + DSD512 for several minutes now and the main issue is the occasional dropout, maybe one per song. It seems to be like HQPlayer is getting interrupted by something.

The only major apps on this machine are X-Plane and FS2020, neither of which are running on this test. I am running the ASUS Armoury Crate app which I was using to monitor CPU/GPU performance but If I kill it, I still get the occasional dropout....not often but it does happen. Weird.

I went back and tried sinc-LI + DSD512 again just to check that I got my testing right. And Jussi is right, I can play 16/44.1 on it but it still drops out occasionally. Maybe it is a Windows thing.

This isn't my machine I'm testing with so while I'm interested in overclocking for a few more FPS in Microsoft Flight Sim 2020, stability is a big deal so I allowed the ASUS AI overclocking feature to do its thing and settle on 5.0 ghz. I might be able to do more but I want to be sure this machine doesn't crash on my friend at high load. Regardless, I'm pretty impressed with what is possible.

OK more testing....(all testing done at ASDM7ECv2). This really took the stress testing up a level. Sinc-L, sinc-LI and sinc-Mx all played 16/44.1khz content but only at DSD256. 512 was pretty much a no go. Of the three, Mx seemed to stress the system the most. I couldn't really get much of anything 24 bit to play, regardless of the sampling rate. I had a little more success taking it down to DSD128 but not when the sampling rates exceeded 96khz. Sinc L and LI had better luck at DSD256 for 24 bit content but really needed to be at DSD128 for anything about 48 khz. Poly-sinc-gauss-xla played successfully at DSD512 across almost all sampling rates (352/32 could produce occasional dropouts).

OK, sorry for the delay but I've been able to do a few tests and I have some interesting results. The Machine: Asus Z790 Maximus Hero motherboard Intel 13900K overclocked to 5.0 ghz Gigabyte Gaming OC RTX 4090 (not overclocked) 64 GB of RAM (DDR5 6000) The software: Roon 2.0 running on a QNAP NAS (Intel W Xeon based) HQPlayer Desktop 4.20.2 (Windows 11, all latest patches) The endpoint: Oppo 205 via RopieeXL 2022.11.1 on a RPi4 I decided to do tests with the poly-sinc-ext, ext2 and ext3 filters since I had the most familiarity with them. Also, I tried ASDM5, ASDM5EC, ASDM5ECv2, ASDM7EC and ASDMECv2 in the modulation section. I used 44.1x512 for SDM processing. First, I worked with just the 13900K alone, then I tried using the CUDA offload by HQPLayer figuring it out and finally, shuttling everything to the 4090. It didn't take that long to overwhelm the 13900K by itself. It's a strong chip but it generally got frustrated raising the modulation above ASDM5EC. I didn't spend too much time testing this scenario. When I asked the 4090 to get into the mix, first I chose the solid check box for the CUDA offload. One thing about the 4090 is that it was really good at modulation...to the point I just went with ASDM7ECv2 and left it there. After that, I experimented with ext3, ext2 and ext. Ext always seemed to be the most difficult with ext3 being the easiest to process. Ext3 worked pretty much with anything I threw at it. Ext2 worked with some music but began to bog down at higher sampling rates (96 khz and above). Ext by itself was kinda lousy....sometimes 44.1 would work but not much else. Then I upgraded the Nvidia Windows drivers to the latest version (527.37) that just dropped a few days ago, posted after I built the PC. And yes there was a change. Now, poly-sinc-ext works pretty much across all music sampling rates, even up to 352/24. I even changed the mode to 48/512 from 44.1/512 to see if there was any discernible difference and there pretty much was none. There are occasions where I might get a dropoff and a few of my files don't play at all...which may be a local thing to me....I need to see if they will play locally rather than through Roon. But otherwise, I'm quite pleased with the 4090 card. it really makes a difference. It's an expensive way to make HQPlayer be the best that it can be, but then again, so is this hobby in general. I'd be interested to see how convolution figures into this, but right now I don't have any filters to test it with. The other obvious point is that since this is a new card and platform, there may be further enhancements to performance with future driver updates I didn't see that Jussi suggested some other filters. Let me try them now.

Greetings friends. I've been using HQPlayer since version 3 but I cannot say that I'm really good at tweaking it, or understanding all the myriad of filters that can be applied and under what circumstances. And when I began using it, it was on an ancient 2008 Mac Pro (8 core) that could barely do any SDM work. These days my primary HQPlayer machine is a QNAP TVS-h1688x NAS running a Linux VM. This machine is running an Intel Xeon W-1250....a nice upgrade for me but hardly the HQPlayer beasts that some people run (when they aren't gaming). And the best CUDA card I think the machine will support is a GTX 1060 (although a 2060 might be possible...someone will have to tell me if this is an upgrade that would matter). But I have something I'm building for a friend who is upgrading a rig I built for him 6 years ago as a three 4K screen flight simulator (X-Plane, MS Flight Sim 2020). This new machine has: Asus Z790 ROG Hero motherboard Intel 13900K (water cooled) Nvidia RTX 4090 64 GB of DDR5 6000 RAM Samsung 980 M.2 SSD Windows 11 So in other words, this machine is a top of the line beast. Before I deliver it to my friend in a few days, does anyone have any torture tests they want me to run with it? Keep in mind that the best DAC in the house is an Oppo 205 being fed by RoPieeeXL on a RP4 so I can't do DSD1024. And I don't have convolution filters for any of my listening environments since I don't know how to do that (I'm guessing a calibrated mic and Room EQ Wizard).

My NAS is a QNAP TVS-h1688x. It features a 3.3 Ghz Xeon W processor (6/12 cores) and configured with 96 GB of total RAM, 70 TB of main spinning disk RAID 5 storage, 2 TB of RAID 1 SSD storage for apps and 2 TB of SSD system cache. it's a business class Linux-based NAS with a hypervisor, not a garden variety machine. In a Ubuntu 20.04 VM, it runs HQPlayer Linux Desktop just fine, and certainly much better than the ancient Mac Pro I was running it on before. Right now its configured for 6 cores and 2 GB of RAM but I can easily change these specs. Output is to a RP4 running RoPieeeXL. Yes I bought this machine mainly for Plex and retiring an old Dell server from a data center I use for my business work but it has enough horsepower to run HQPlayer pretty well as a bonus. Not all of us have the budget to dedicate a machine for this (and I still have a replace a tube pre-amp in my primary listening room). I could put an Nvidia card in it but right now it's only good for GTX1080 class cards and its limited to half sized cards. Not that you can cheaply find one anyway and I expect that these days you need 20x0 class cards or better to get real value out of that.

Thanks for this explanation. Yes I was asking the embedded vs Desktop Linux product. I have the desktop product working now reasonably well. The 6/12 core Xeon W processor in my QNAP isn't going to set the world on fire compared to new 12th gen Core chips but it's significantly faster than the ancient Mac Pro I was running HQPlayer Desktop on. And setting up a virtualized Ubuntu environment wasn't that difficult. After that it was just installing the HQPlayer package and following it up with adding dependencies. The format for the .img image for HQPlayer OS isn't recognized by QNAP's virtualization station so there doesn't seem to be an easy way for me to use it. Does anyone know the memory footprint that HQPlayer on Ubuntu 20.04 would like to operate in? 1 GB of RAM? 2 GB? 4 GB? More?

Ok, I'll bite. Please elucidate.