Hi guys, i'm a little confused about this whole thing! I've compared server to physical i/o both in VEP5 and it seems that audio coming back from the physical audio is faster, meaning less latency! Last week, i got rid of Logic completely and since i had been using PT for years for audio and for mixing, i decided to attempt also using it for MIDI. So, with a TDM system, i believe all audio routing, bussing and i/o's are being handled from the TDM cards (or HDX for new systems), and since all audio is handled by the PCIe cards, in theory, they're should be less strain on the CPU! Of course, your host machine has to be able to handle a bunch of audio streams coming to it on its interface, but that's what PT is supposed to do well! In my early tests, so far, i can get a pretty fair amount of instances on a 12-core system, the slave machine being the 12-core and an old Harper Town 8-core running PT10 HD at this time. I'm running MIDI over Lan and so far, with VEP5 and mainly using VSL libraries and Kontakt, it's pretty good. When using Play, it was horrible... Probably will try hosting the Play stuff in my host PT Harper Town Mac Pro 2008 on a seperate VEP5 server.
My plan is to pipe 64 mono tracks on 32 tracks from the 12-core from an SSL MADI Xtreme card to PT HD MADI. Right now, as i am testing and waiting for HDX system, running 24 stereo AES tracks from the SSL MADI SX to three 192 Digital interfaces.
Cheers
PT10 HD HD6 on a Magma chassis on a MP early 2008 with 32 Gigs of RAM. Lion 7.2
VEP5 latest build on 12-core Westmere with 48 Gigs of RAM. Mostly VSL Cube and some Kontakt. Lion 7.2