There’s some discussion on web forums with some people suggestig that Pro Tools 12 performs better than Pro Tools 11. So we have decided to put this claim to the test.
We use the same session, the same machine, the same interface and run the same test, the results are shown below.
Test Machine Specification
- Mac Pro
- 6-Core Intel Xeon E5
- Processor Speed: 3.5 GHz
- Number of Processors: 1
- Total Number of Cores: 6
- L2 Cache (per Core): 256 KB
- L3 Cache: 12 MB
- Memory: 16 GB
Pro Tools Session Specification
- Interface: Apogee Ensemble Thunderbolt
- Session length 5 minutes
- 96Khz
- 24 bit
- H/W buffer size set at 64 samples
- 96 tracks of mono audio, with edits at every 1 second
- Volume automation recorded on every audio track
- Disk cache disabled to emulate native versions of Pro Tools
- All audio tracks had an instance of Avid Channel Strip and Dverb inserted
- 128 MIDI tracks with an instance of AIR Boom running with MIDI data
- A mono audio track would record without issue along with 95 audio tracks in playback
Pro Tools 11.3.1 Performance Test
System usage for the session is shown below. No crashes occured during record and playback.
Pro Tools 12 Performance Test
System usage for the session is shown below. No crashes occured during record or playback.
Pro Tools 12 Performance Compared To Pro Tools 11 - Summary
In our test we could find no significant performance difference between a session in Pro Tools 11.3.1 and Pro Tools 12.
It has been reported that Pro Tools 12 has significant improvements under the hood, our test seems to indicate that it has no effect on session performance.