Sluggish/sloooow GUI Bitwig 2.23 macOS Sierra 10.12.6

[pekbro]

https://youtu.be/9DyUitTVWlw

[dom@bitwig]

Ok, so the problem seems to be that Macs tend to throttle down the CPU (and likely the GPU) when they "think" the momentary load can be managed at lower clock but then, when suddenly the load gets up - there's scrolling, a heavy VST starts processing audio, etc. - they choke because they can't get back up fast enough. This is exactly the behaviour my Surface Pro 4 (and I suspect most laptops) have when running on battery-saving power profile. But in Windows I can crank it up to performance mode and solve this (+ there are dedicated tools to do more).

No, it's not battery saving strategies as in the Surface devices causing it - in the case of the Macbooks, it really is just thermal throttling because of too much heat due to insufficient cooling in place.
Works fine for a moment from a "cold" start, then starts to kick in, is totally depending on room temperature etc.

The video one post above, even if the preview pic looks a bit hilarious, is pretty much spot on.
You also can force it to throttle using just any demanding app, not exclusive to DAWs, just google it and you will find loads of reports like this:
https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments ... orking_as/

It just depends on the app or DAW what kind of negative effects you see first when it starts underperforming.

[antic604]

No, it's not battery saving strategies as in the Surface devices causing it - in the case of the Macbooks, it really is just thermal throttling because of too much heat due to insufficient cooling in place.Works fine for a moment from a "cold" start, then starts to kick in, is totally depending on room temperature etc.

Ok, so how will you explain other DAWs running just fine on the very same machines? I've no reason to doubt such reports. Maybe there's a "trick" you need to employ to keep the clock e.g. at 2GHz instead of it wildly jumping between 1 and 3GHz?

For example on an actively-cooled Surface Pro 4 I can set min & max CPU clock in power profile to 99% and it will chug along at constant, flat 2.1GHz, i.e. will never engage the turbo and thus stays well within its heat profile and silent. Having said that, my can run at 3GHz +/- 0.2GHz for hours on end, it just becomes warm and noisy.

So, I wouldn't discard this possibility. Reach out to other Mac DAW devs, after all most of you are anyway located in Berlin

[dom@bitwig]

Just read the end of my very last post again!

[antic604]

Just read the end of my very last post again!

I did! I'm still not convinced, but since I don't have a Mac I can't verify this

[Hanz Meyzer]

AFAIK Logic's GUI already is optimized (using Metal) and Ableton also uses GPU acceleration with some scaling factors. That would explain that those DAWs will cause less throttling on throttle-gate macs.

Apple is really braindead making their Macbooks thinner and thinner... What is this for? The device of course should be able to run the cpu on max speed permanently. Everything else is a really poor design. My macbook pro late 2013 already is thin enough, but has no throttling problems at all, since there still is room for a proper air cooling system.

I think you can test yourself, if a gui is kind of optimized or not so much: Open the activity monitor, sort by cpu usage, move the window to the bottom of the screen, so you only see the first line. Now heavily zoom in the arranger of Logic Pro X or Ableton and watch CPU usage. Never seems to be more than 60-80% (100% is one core). If you do that in Bitwig, you easily will see peaks above 160%, at least here.

Dom, thank you for this clarification, nice to read some lines from you guys in here. Any E.T.A. for 2.5? Very curious I think last year it was around January?

[kdejaeger]

I secretly hoop bitwig devs can use the vulkan api. That should last another 25 years right , just like opengl did.

[Enrize]

Ok, i think i've found the bottleneck of the GUI performance on 4k/5k displays. First of all i want to break down the myth that only MacOS has GUI problems. I decided to buy a Windows Desktop PC just for playing games in the evenings. I bought Core i7-8700, RTX 2080Ti and 16 GB RAM (1 stick, single channel mode). Yesterday, i decided to check how Bitwig works on this machine (before that my main working platform was a MacBook Pro 15'' 2017). So i run a few big projects on my 5K LG display and performance was nearly the same (bad) as on my MPB. Today i've decided to add another 16GB of RAM (another stick). So now i have two 16GB sticks DDR4 2666 working in dual channel (Total 32GB). I've decided to test Bitwig again just in case, and i was really surprised how much GUI performance increased! It was nearly x2 times faster than before. Its still not perfect of course, but I've come to conclusion that RAM bandwidth is the main bottleneck and reason of the poor performance. Giving that MBP only has LPDDR3 2133 RAM this might be true. That's where implementation of full GPU acceleration should definitely help.

[Enrize]

Another strange observation. If devs read this, it might be interesting.

When i start a blank new project i have smooth 60 FPS during zoom and scroll. When i drag an audio clip from a Browser into the arrange panel, it still smooth. But when i move/resize/loop this clip i can absolutely feel that frame rate dropped a lot during zoom and scroll. Sounds like a bug to me...Maybe worth a look,

I will also report it to support e-mail.

UPDATE : As long as i just drag clips (as many as i want) from a brower and don't move/resize/loop them around i always have 60+ FPS, but as soon as i move/loop/resize at least one clip, the frame rate drops a lot. If i have multiple tracks and let's say i moved a clip on a Track #3, after i delete the whole track where i moved a clip, the FPS also got back to 60.

P.S. Is there a software that shows me how much FPS i have on a desktop? So i can proove it.

[JHernandez]

I see what you're doing, the Crouching Tiger keep Pawing the Dragon Technique. Old school, but I like it.

Godspeed!

[newtobitwig]

P.S. Is there a software that shows me how much FPS i have on a desktop? So i can proove it.

FRAPS,Razer Cortex,Geforce Experience?
They work on games though not so sure about other softwares

[Enrize]

I see what you're doing, the Crouching Tiger keep Pawing the Dragon Technique. Old school, but I like it.

Godspeed!

huh?..what do you mean?

[jonljacobi]

Even DDR3's performance should be more than up to the task. If you really want to see if it's OS-related, install Windows via Boot Camp and then compare. When I say OS-related, I'm saying that it could also be that the tools or libraries used for the macOS and Windows versions could be different, or not optimized as well for one or the other platforms.

Install Linux on a Thunderbolt drive (I've never tried this) and you might see just how different the three builds are. Actually, now that I think of it, you could do the same with Windows To Go if you don't want to go the Boot Camp route.

[Enrize]

P.S. Is there a software that shows me how much FPS i have on a desktop? So i can proove it.

FRAPS,Razer Cortex,Geforce Experience?
They work on games though not so sure about other softwares

I think they only detect DirectX 3D environment?

[Hanz Meyzer]

Since the cpu runs almost at the same speed in both systems, the problem will appear on both systems (almost) equally.