BFD2 users - I found something out about performance

[XoechZ]

Hello!

In the FXpansion forums people always suggest to enable 16 bit mode within BFD2´s engine to save some performance. Today I was curious and disabled it, so I was in 24 bit mode. And guess what happened - CPU performance suddenly was about 2% lower (!!!) than in 16 bit mode.

16 bit mode about 10% CPU
24 bit mode about 8% CPU

with the same drumkit loaded, playing the same grooves.

Maybe thats because I run Reaper in 24/44.1, so 24 bit is Reaper´s "native" bit depth and no upsampling is needed.

The only downfall is that 24 bit mode uses more RAM, because the 24 bit samples are of course bigger that the 16 bit ones. But sound quality is better.

So, if you have enough RAM and want to save a little CPU, disable 16 bit mode in BFD2 :-)


Greetings,

XoechZ

[Kundalinguist]

Cool. I'm gonna take off the 16 bit and give it a whirl. I was just following the herd.

[drillbit]

24 bit is considerably better quality with drum samples because the different volumes of samples and the long decays (eg on cymbals). Once you start compressing like crazy the 8bit qualities on low level 16bit become aparent.

My theory on the 24bit cpu use is that BFD2 converts to 16 bit depth on the fly and thus uses more CPU. The only real loss is RAM, and if you have enough then all is cool. I could be wrong.

I'll ask Sk0t (programmer of BFD) when I see him. He is now back in Perth.

BFD1.2/8-Bt Kit/Percussion/GURU/SynthSquad/TheGlue/FxpansionBetaTester (3years+)

[drillbit]

Ok, chatted with the man (SK0t at Fxpansion), his reply:

"It would be a fairly tiny difference between the two. 24bit mode is actually stored as 32bit floats in RAM, so no type conversion, but 16bit mode is stored as 16bit ints, which reauire promotion to 32bit float during synthesis."
- SK0t

[Kundalinguist]

24 it is.