04-10-2019, 02:20 AM
I tested the setup on i9-9900k and Gigabyte Designare Motherboard and got nearly the same results.
I then installed a hackintosh and the issues went away - I could run 4x-6x more tracks without hitting the buffer.
Ardour/Mixbus is using the cairo graphics library for painting the GUI. Using Linux and Mac OS the library works well but in Windows the library uses stone age old GDI win32 interface which was invented back in Windows XP and is long superseeded with more performant interfaces like Direct2D, OpenGL, etc.
And as graphic cards driver are no longer optimized to handle the GDI interface this could be a possible show stopper.
My assumption is that due to calling the old GDI interface Windows internally has to do expensive context switches due to backward compatibility and therefore the timing gets messed up.
I then installed a hackintosh and the issues went away - I could run 4x-6x more tracks without hitting the buffer.
Ardour/Mixbus is using the cairo graphics library for painting the GUI. Using Linux and Mac OS the library works well but in Windows the library uses stone age old GDI win32 interface which was invented back in Windows XP and is long superseeded with more performant interfaces like Direct2D, OpenGL, etc.
And as graphic cards driver are no longer optimized to handle the GDI interface this could be a possible show stopper.
My assumption is that due to calling the old GDI interface Windows internally has to do expensive context switches due to backward compatibility and therefore the timing gets messed up.