I’d like to buy a Nebulae 2 and I saw that there are two versions: Pi 3b and Pi4 both still available on the market. Can anyone tell me if the performance of the Nebulae 2 is better in the Pi4 version or are they actually equal in computing power?
Thank you!
Hey @RatioReso, great question! If you are looking to just use Nebulae as a granular instrument, then both hardware versions behave the exact same functionally and performance wise. The revision was made so we can keep Nebulae available and not discontinue it. If you are looking to use Nebulae as a programmable DSP platform, then you will benefit from the Pi4 version’s increased performance capabilities.
FYI all new Nebulae’s on the market carry a Pi4 on the back!
With all due respect, the stock micro SD card and USB thumb drive are not that fast.
For better performance, buy a higher class speed micro SD card and reflash it with an SD card image from QUBit’s firmware page. Also a faster USB thumb drive for loading Wav or Flac files will help, but only at startup.
Using it as programmable DSP platform, the rpi3 is slower than the rpi4 version, but not much in serial processing it seems. Realms (see Cinematic Laboratory) with almost 75MB of Flac files takes almost the same amount of time (around a minute) to start and I’m doing some nasty loops at the start of the instrument just to have the best synced possible pulse out. It’s not like 25% faster, only a fraction.
When using the (Granular) instrument itself, there is no difference at all as the CSound software will run its audio clock at 48kHz and it’s ‘control’ clock at a fixed division of that.
Cheers, Ian
Many thanks for both your kind replies and sorry for my late response (Covid hit me again!).
According to Ian, it seems that differences between the Pi3 and Pi4 are not “huge”. This is important for me because some dealers offers the Pi3 version at a cheaper price. The most important thing to do is to upgrade both microcard and thumb drive.
Thanks again for your kind responses and, a message to Ian, hope that realms will be released. I watched the video presentation and was amazed by the result.