POLL: Which DAW has the best VST performance??

[standalone]

My selection are just the BIG DAWs which have a wide range of functions! (and yes: no cubase!)

No Cubase, no Pro Tools, no Logic, no Reason ... when you say BIG you mean little, I guess.

[Robert Randolph]

My selection are just the BIG DAWs which have a wide range of functions! (and yes: no cubase!)

No Cubase, no Pro Tools, no Logic, no Reason ... when you say BIG you mean little, I guess.

No Logic makes sense if he's on PC... the rest only really make sense to leave out if he wants to pirate it.

[5Lives]

I've found that Cubase, PT and Logic all tend to have similar performance when doing the "how many of X can I load and playback without issues" on OS X. It might not be the best way to measure CPU performance, but once you get consistency across a number of DAWs (using AU, AAX, and VST) and then one comes along that does much worse, it points to that DAW not being as good in terms of performance. S1 is like that.

Having said, S1 is my favorite DAW right now I happily will use it's very handy Transform to Audio and carry on.

[Phorous]

My selection are just the BIG DAWs which have a wide range of functions! (and yes: no cubase!)

No Cubase, no Pro Tools, no Logic, no Reason ... when you say BIG you mean little, I guess.

No Logic makes sense if he's on PC... the rest only really make sense to leave out if he wants to pirate it.

No Cubase though? It is literally the DAW of the company responsible for VST used by many high profile musicians and has been around since before some people here were born

I guess Cubase isn't in the KVR "Super Kool DAW Klub"

Or maybe its so powerful it has transcended being a DAW

[machinesworking]

Because DAW Y doesn't load many Kontakt plug ins compared to DAW X in no way makes DAW Y less CPU efficient with VSTs.

It's not JUST Kontakt, but it's most evident with Kontakt. Other plugins also take up more CPU in S1 compared to Reaper (percentages of difference between them vary).

As for "NI being at fault", here's a counterexample. Cubase has issues with tempo ramps, CPU usage is 50% higher during tempo ramps compared to some other DAWs (including Logic, Live, Reaper, Sonar). That's not a NI issue since from their side the implementation is correct (and this was confirmed by NI themselves).

The point wasn't your argument that PC Reaper is CPU efficient, we get that.
The point was Kontakt is very very random in it's CPU usage depending on the DAW, it will never spike the CPU on some DAWs and others it will do it fairly consistently. I suspect it's not the DAWs in this case. NI have over the years improved drastically, but they do not have the best track record in regards to plug ins behaving in a similar way cross platform and DAW. In Ableton Live for instance Battery 2 would crash Live randomly, Abelton support confirmed it and said there was nothing they could do on their end, it was fixed about six months later in a final update. Absynth was for years far more of a CPU pig on Windows than OSX, and Reaktor was dammed near unusable until later version of 4 on OSX... Now the last thing I notice with NI is Kontakt still has issues on various DAWs, and because of their track record I cannot say that it's somehow the DAW developers fault.

All that said I've been a NI Komplete owner since v2 and they do great things, I just would not use them to compare DAWs, especially with what I perceive to be the most problematic plug in they make. U-He Diva, Zebra or even NI Massive for instance would be a much more logical choice.

[Tonberry]

I mess when I can with: Ableton Live, Bitwig, Cubase, Reaper, Renoise, Studio One 2 & 3, Fl Studio and always try things to see how they go, some more some less extensively.

Of those Renoise and Reaper are in a league of their own for sure. Everything that comes tied to those programs takes pitiful amount of resources and there are no spikes. Of those two Renoise is better because it has one thing Reaper doesn't: the ability to load plugins as separate processes (sandbox mode) which makes working with unstable plugins so much more viable in big projects and slightly more multi-thread-shuffle friendly (although slightly more memory intensive too). I'm sure you really can't go wrong with either of them though!

As for the "it's not host's fault that for some daws plugins fail to deliver" argument I don't think it's true. I've used a lot of Renoise and am recently spending some time with Reaper and get zero surprises. Is this a coincidence then that well written programs have no issues with cpu spikes and the like while more poorly optimized hosts do? I highly doubt that

[Robert Randolph]

I mess when I can with: Ableton Live, Bitwig, Cubase, Reaper, Renoise, Studio One 2 & 3, Fl Studio and always try things to see how they go, some more some less extensively.

Of those Renoise and Reaper are in a league of their own for sure. Everything that comes tied to those programs takes pitiful amount of resources and there are no spikes. Of those two Renoise is better because it has one thing Reaper doesn't: the ability to load plugins as separate processes (sandbox mode) which makes working with unstable plugins so much more viable in big projects and slightly more multi-thread-shuffle friendly (although slightly more memory intensive too). I'm sure you really can't go wrong with either of them though!

As for the "it's not host's fault that for some daws plugins fail to deliver" argument I don't think it's true. I've used a lot of Renoise and am recently spending some time with Reaper and get zero surprises. Is this a coincidence then that well written programs have no issues with cpu spikes and the like while more poorly optimized hosts do? I highly doubt that

Reaper has dedicated processes for plugins (i.e. sandboxing). So that kinda discredits your post a lot.

Renoise has problems with various plugins. I use renoise probably more than anything else, since it's what I doodle in when nothing else is happening. Renoise also doesn't seem to fit what the OP wants, since he asked for a wide range of functions and that's nearly the antithesis of Renoise.

[chk071]

I don't think any of the "big" DAW's is "poorly optimized". It's a bit apples and oranges anyway, as the different DAW's differ much in terms of features. If there's a video engine running in the background i would guess it has an effect on the general performance compared to a DAW which doesn't even have a video engine. e.g.

[Ogopogo]

Is this a coincidence then that well written programs have no issues with cpu spikes and the like while more poorly optimized hosts do? I highly doubt that

How do you know what programs are well written other than by their performance?

[EvilDragon]

Of those two Renoise is better because it has one thing Reaper doesn't: the ability to load plugins as separate processes (sandbox mode) which makes working with unstable plugins so much more viable in big projects and slightly more multi-thread-shuffle friendly (although slightly more memory intensive too).

Sure Reaper can do that as well.

[aMUSEd]

Of those two Renoise is better because it has one thing Reaper doesn't: the ability to load plugins as separate processes (sandbox mode) which makes working with unstable plugins so much more viable in big projects and slightly more multi-thread-shuffle friendly (although slightly more memory intensive too).

Sure Reaper can do that as well.

Yeah Reaper has had that as long as I can remember (possibly before Renoise). In fact Reaper has multiple approaches to managing buggy plugins.

[Phorous]

The way REAPER does it is actually the most efficient solution AFAIK.

All plugins are isolated along with the audio engine in a single process, so there is no IPC besides the REAPER UI calling the audio engine process. So you don't sacrifice much performance for the feature. At least from what I can tell that's how it works.

[EvilDragon]

There's that option, and then there's an option for having an individual process per plugin insance (that's the difference between separate and dedicated process options).

[KingTuck]

Who can use all hosts and compare? lol

So I have Sonar, Reaper, Samplitude 10, Digital Performer, Pro Tools 11, Studio One v3, Digital Performer 8, Digital Performer 9, SAWStudio, Renoise, MuLab, Tracktion, Reason 6.5, N-track and Logic Pro X.

I have done extensive performance tests across most of these recently, and without a doubt the results are clear:

This thread is idiotic.

(and FYI, in my testing, the 3 most efficient hosts on my 2 systems aren't listed in the poll)

Can I honestly ask, why in the f**k do you have so many DAWs? Nobody, ever, could reasonably learn to use that many with any helpful articulation between them. Is it just a collection thing? I'm realizing more and more on KVR that this is primarily a collection board and in all honesty the majority of users aren't very interested in music software without this forum based social aspect.

(PS: Please don't say something like "you don't know me" or "you don't know what I'm capable of". This is a safe assumption, no great producers rely on a table filled with shit. Much more typically they find what works and stick with it.)

[Robert Randolph]

Who can use all hosts and compare? lol

So I have Sonar, Reaper, Samplitude 10, Digital Performer, Pro Tools 11, Studio One v3, Digital Performer 8, Digital Performer 9, SAWStudio, Renoise, MuLab, Tracktion, Reason 6.5, N-track and Logic Pro X.

I have done extensive performance tests across most of these recently, and without a doubt the results are clear:

This thread is idiotic.

(and FYI, in my testing, the 3 most efficient hosts on my 2 systems aren't listed in the poll)

Can I honestly ask, why in the f**k do you have so many DAWs? Nobody, ever, could reasonably learn to use that many with any helpful articulation between them. Is it just a collection thing? I'm realizing more and more on KVR that this is primarily a collection board and in all honesty the majority of users aren't very interested in music software without this forum based social aspect.

(PS: Please don't say something like "you don't know me" or "you don't know what I'm capable of". This is a safe assumption, no great producers rely on a table filled with shit. Much more typically they find what works and stick with it.)

I've been doing digital audio on computers for ~25 years now. I've also worked for 2 companies that produce DAW software, both doing sales and support. I've also ran a recording studio here for ~8 years until I closed it down somewhat recently.

Besides that, one of my hobbies is simply using music technology. I enjoy it, and it's what I do for fun 'when the music time is done'. When they're done working some people watch TV, some people browse Facebook, some folks work on cars. I like to explore the world of audio software, plug-ins, hardware, white papers, whatever I can get my hands on. I've fully read the manuals of the software I own multiple times, and many of those I don't.

I'm not amazing with all of them, and I don't really care. I'm very proficient with SAW, Pro Tools, DP, Renoise and Samplitude pre-pro X. Currently I work in DP, mess around in renoise, used PT/SAW/Samplitude in a professional capacity in the past and the rest of them are simply interesting to me.

As to your implication that some people 'aren't interested in music': I haven't written a song in years. Not everyone out there is trying to make music (quite frankly, going to school for music ruined that for me). Some of us are helping other people make music, and as such we get to spend more time focusing on the tools to do so. It also helps when you enjoy that aspect of it as well

Perhaps to put it more clearly: The time you're using to make music in your DAW is the time I'm using to learn more about various music technology. It's what I enjoy. I don't care about writing amazing songs or 'producing' or any aspect of creating music of my own.

Think of me as a mechanic instead of a race car driver.