SONAR 8 | Benchmarks

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Initial SONAR 8 Benchmarks

In the development of SONAR 8, we strove to make the engine, processes, and user interface more efficient in as many ways as possible. In order to determine the success of our efforts, we devised a series of stringent tests which were conducted on a variety of system configurations in our Quality Assurance labs. While no testing procedure can account for every available system configuration or possible real world scenario, we were very pleased with the results. After careful examination of the results, which are summarized below, we feel comfortable in saying that SONAR 8 is the most efficient and powerful version of SONAR to date.

Test 1: Playback of a typical SONAR project, loaded with plug-ins

This test exercised internal mixing, processing, and CPU load while playing back SONAR projects.

Our analysis indicated that SONAR 8 typically uses 5-20% less CPU than SONAR 7.0.2 when playing back projects loaded with plug-ins.

Test 2: Recording high-bandwidth audio

For this test we recorded several tracks of audio at 24-bit/192kHz at various latencies, exercising SONAR's ability to efficiently stream data from an audio interface to the hard disk.

Our analysis indicated that SONAR 8 uses 15-20% less CPU than SONAR 7.0.2 when recording at 2 ms of latency, and as much as 50% less CPU when recording at 10 ms of latency.

Test 3: Live input monitoring

For this test, we armed and input monitored a large number of tracks, exercising SONAR's ability to efficiently stream audio to and from the interface.

Our analysis indicated that SONAR 8 used as much as 45% less CPU than SONAR 7.0.2 when input monitoring a large number of tracks.

Test 4: SONARBench

We ran the SONARBench test project that many SONAR users like to run when they compare their DAWs.

The results for this test were outstanding, but quite variable! We saw performance gains between 30% and 240% when comparing SONAR 8 to SONAR 7.0.2. We are still investigating the variances, but the good news is everyone who ran this test saw at least 30% gains between versions 7 and 8.

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