A Couple Q's on differences between Duo X and Dwarf

  • I have seen the thread where a minimum latency of around ~5ms was achieved by getting the Duo X buffer size down to 64 samples. Do we have an idea as to how much bigger the latency (even at 128 samples) on the Dwarf is likely to be? Still under 7ms? or more like under 10ms? I sometimes play very technical music at high BPMs on guitar and yeah… I need to know this I guess

  • Is there a ballpark idea on how much less powerful the CPU on the Dwarf will be compared to the Duo X? I was surprised to see my Duo X loads some of the stock/suggested/preset pedalboards immediately maxing out the CPU to 100% so would like to know if those same presets become too much then on Dwarf

  • Any gotchas & limitations anticipated with the USB audio interface functionality of the Dwarf? (or indeed with the Duo X if the USB audio interface feature makes it to that). Stuff like “you can’t actually use XYZ while using the device as interface”, or performance of CPU affected by X% while using as audio interface. Also if latency will be similar performance, unaffected or much worse than using the unit in standalone mode

Anything else I’m not even thinking of just let me know, too, if you know of differences between the two.

I’m not fussed about the knobs and buttons difference, that being the most obvious one.
Thanks a mill

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  1. Latency is the same for all the units, as the codec is very similar between them and we all run them with the same config.
    Likely we will add an official option for 64 frames or something that reduces latency, should be doable on Duo X and Dwarf, but on the Duo it is out of question.

  2. Well, the Duo X limited edition run had a Quad-Core 1.5GHz CPU, and production units have a Hexa-Core, 4 of 1.4GHz and 2 of 1.7GHz (the big.Little architecture thing). In comparison, the Dwarf has a Quad-Core 1.3GHz.
    So the Dwarf sits between the Duo and Duo X, but a lot closer to the Duo X than the Duo. The 4 vs 2 cores makes a lot of difference to make the entire system feel smooth.
    I know that the CPU on the Duo X can do a lot, but not all plugins are optimized the best way for it. If there is a plugin that you feel consumes a lot more CPU than it should, feel free to mention it.

  3. I did not make any tests regarding latency on USB audio mode, so I rather not comment on that. The obvious “gotcha” is that using USB for audio/midi while also actively doing stuff in the web UI leads to xruns (aka audio drop-outs). I am not sure if USB allows to prioritize data packets, something we still need to research. Using USB audio together with WiFi for the web interface gives the best results in my experience.

The big difference of Dwarf and other units is mostly hardware. The headphone is now the small jack, MIDI uses the 3-pin audio-like-mini-jack and there is only 1 screen obviously.
The Dwarf also has knob pagination, apart from the full control pagination. with 3 knob pages per knob, and 8 full control pages, you get 72 addressings (3x3x8) possible for the knobs.

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