Confirmed, Scheme-3 is the best!


BTW.
I disabled some more hidden devices in device manager and applied the most recent optimisation from cics' site - the one responsible for reducing USB polling and guess what happened? I had to reduced the SFS to 50 MB, cause I found the sound too smooth and washed out of details. Now it's just great. I don't know if Mani's drivers work so much better that they don't interfere with other stuff or mine are hopeless. Anyway, this one is big, try!

I managed to play with 4 cores on my thin Vista build, but it sounds very bad compared to dual core cfg. I don't know whether it is driver related and my card likes two cores better than four or is it because of some optimisations, but I don't recall anything like that (besides win32separation...)

But I discovered sth interesting regarding SFS - completely reverse situation - smaller values like mani's 50MB works much better than very large like my favourite 450MB. Anyway I'm back to 2 cores again and it souns so freaking awesome.

I'll check this on my new machine that I'm building next month. This time it will be intel, so maybe that will shed some light on the sfs and multicores case.

have a nice night
Marcin

And I chose FAT16, because it's the fastest one. Like I said, these are the tweaks that I use and I don't care if people gonna use them. I was asked to post them and I did. These settings are open for discussion and I'm open to hear what you guys have to say about them.


I'm sorry, but that batch file is like 5% of what's on cics' site. I don't think I need to convince you that 7 active services should be better than 27?

Mani, ru using W2008 or W2008R2, cause they're completely different:
W2008 - Vista
W2008R2 - W7

Maybe I shouldn't have posted that... I don't have any proofs. I can only say that these settings are good for me, best probably and cics' optimisations work mostly the same in Vista/W7 which is obvious. I'm sorry, could you point one that doesn't work? The goal is one - to speed things up and it does. Nick's recomendations work as well, at least I hear the difference. Maybe you could suggest better optimisations, I'm sure everyone would want that

My system is Vista 32 Business (no sp1) and I don't see how it would be different for Ultimate etc I also have a second, regular installation of that system, where XXHE with that same settings is unlistenable. Is this enough recommendation? To sum up: I don't force anybody to apply these things, I just share what I feel is best. I didn't come up with everything yesterday. You should know that I've been messing with that stuff for a long time now If I wrote 'put your pc on fire', would you do it? 

Hi Guys,

I'll now describe everything that I've applied to my Vista 32bit installation, step by step. Keep in mind, that in the end, your OS will not be 'fully useable' and it shoulnd't be. You don't want to install 3rd party apps, drivers or devices to spoil the sound. You won't have access to network either!
Ok, here is what I did starting from a clean install:
1) Turned off: UAC (control panel->user accounts), indexing (right click on a system drive in Windows Explorer->properties)
2) Installed drivers for sound card, gpu and set up a ramdisk drive and XXHE on it (fat16, 64kb cluster size, 1500 MB). I think things could've been even better without GPU driver.
3) Performed all the optimisations from cics' site. Although they're ment for XP, they work the same for Vista/W7, well, almost all of them. Refer to Optimisations, but skip steps 4 and 6 of chapter 7.1. In Chapter 7.2 disable unused devices like unused USB ports, IDE channels, integrated audio and think of anything else that may not be useful - be careful. In Chapter 7.3, step 2, disable SuperFetch as well (locate that DWORD and change the value to 0).
4) In Regedit, HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM CurrentControlSet\Control\PriorityControl, add a new DWORD, "IRQ8Priority" , and set the value to 1.
5) Set power scheme to performance (control panel->power settings) and change advanced power settings: turn off display and hdds after 1min
6) In REGEDIT, HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Multimedia\SystemProfile there is a key “SystemResponsiveness” set this to “0”.
7) In REGEDIT, HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Multimedia\SystemProfile
There are sub key tasks for;

Audio
Capture
Distribution
Games
Playback
Pro Audio
Window Manager

These KEYs are how MMSS prioritises music replay processes.
For the “Audio”, “Playback” and “Pro Audio” keys try the following DWORD values
Affinity = 3 (dec)
Background Only = TRUE
BackgroundPriority = 8 (dec)
Clock Rate = 1000000 (dec)
GPU Priority = 4 (dec)
Priority = 8 (dec)
Scheduling Category = High
SFIO Priority = High

Turned off DEP. Start Menu->run-> type 'CMD', press enter->type "bcdedit.exe /set nx AlwaysOff”
9) Disabled unnecessary services. I have only 7 active services:
Mulimedia Class Scheduler
Group Policy Client
Plug and Play
DCOM SERVER PROCESS LAUNCHER
COM+ ENENT SYSTEM
User Profile Service
Remote Procedure Call (RPC)

You can safely disable other services, even Windows Audio which is not needed for Engine#4.

10) Disabled unnecessary items in Autoruns. I enclosed my settings, there is almost nothing in there, only drivers for sound card, usb and gpu.

Enjoy!

Marcin

Off here.

PS
I lost my post about optimisations, wrrrrrrrrrrrrr 

Yes, I can confirm that SFS matters a lot! This is still the most influential factor! I noticed during optimisations, that I needed greater SFS values, while my system was becoming faster and faster. Finally, after all optimisations, I need SFS at 350 MB (even 450MB). Anything lower than 300 MB is harsh, edgy, dry, just wrong! Yes, there is slightly better control, but you lose timbre, great depth of soundstage, dynamics and sound is, like my girlfriend said, buzzy. So according to my experiences, I assume that large SFS values are the best once your system is very fast. I think that on a regular OS installation, without optimisations, big SFS values sounded clumsy, because system wasn't able to process big chunks of data fast enough. That's not the case now. I'd really appreciate if someone could perform full optimisation (I'm writing tutorial in a moment) and try large SFS. But nothing is perfect and with that high SFS values, playback stops after few minutes with message - 'OutOfMemory Exception'. Peter, is it possible for XXHE to release some memory while playing? Does it have to consume more and more memory during playback? I mean the memory that was needed for previous track.

Greets,
Marcin

Nick, I'd love to try, but I'm running dual-core CPU right now, so I'm not convinced that it'd bring any improvements. Do you? I'd switch to quad core, but I'd have to reinstall the system and make all the tweaks again and I'm pretty much sick of doing it again, so I think I'm gonna pass, especially that I can't imagine further improvements 

Yeah, that was me. Actually, I ended up with 7 services running Give me some time to write about everything I applied.

going from w7 to Vista/ramdisk was improvement, bit very small one compared to what I have now, you wouldn't believe. I'll be back later, work...

haha. you killed me with your latest post. :XD I'll write them on a regular basis lol You know I'll have second OS tomorrow and it's a good thing, because it won't disyract me from work and in the evening I'm gonna seat on my sofa and enjoy music of my vista - ultimate audio edition

Peter, you made my day

hi guys,

I'm typing from my smartphone, cause I gave up networking in my OS. I ended up with 8 services running and almost empty autoruns. I'll post full report once I set a new system for work. I applied all tweaks I came across with. The sound is unbelievable on my overclocked Phenom (3.8GHz dual-core).

Nick - no swap. I'post everything tomorrow so stay tuned

I don't think it will be half as fast as optimized regular Vista installation.