Bitwig

alexpen · Post by **alexpen** » Tue Apr 17, 2018 10:25 am

After finishing two "middle sized" projects as a test balloon - around 50 tracks (audio, vst, etc.) I definitely agree that bitwig team has to address the performance issue.

Bitwig has beautiful workflow, "modular mindset" and many-many things have been just done right from the beginning. I absolutely love this DAW. However currently I just can't really switch to it completely due to poor performance and will stick with Logic.

From my perspective --> no new features (I'm absolutely fine with current ones), please address performance as a very first thing.

Enrize · Post by **Enrize** » Tue Apr 17, 2018 10:58 am

alexpen wrote:After finishing two "middle sized" projects as a test balloon - around 50 tracks (audio, vst, etc.) I definitely agree that bitwig team has to address the performance issue.

Bitwig has beautiful workflow, "modular mindset" and many-many things have been just done right from the beginning. I absolutely love this DAW. However currently I just can't really switch to it completely due to poor performance and will stick with Logic.

From my perspective --> no new features (I'm absolutely fine with current ones), please address performance as a very first thing.

100% Agree. I can't extend my license unless there will be at least some optimizations in 2.4. I'm not telling about full GPU OpenGL acceleration, as i fully understand its quite a long story (which i hope to see in 2.5 though)

_TLG_ · Post by **_TLG_** » Tue Apr 17, 2018 6:08 pm

Yes, this is sad, but I didn't renew the licence due the poor macOS performance too.
I have powered MBP i7 3.1 GHZ 16GB RAM, but the performane is a joke

Hanz Meyzer · Post by **Hanz Meyzer** » Tue Apr 17, 2018 7:13 pm

Oh man, 2.3.3rc1 seems to make it even worse. The GUI performance is SO RIDICULOUS SLOW!!!!!!!

For example while the zoom is fast on the pianoroll, dragging is like slowmotion, the movements of the elements lag so much. It makes no joy to use this mess. f**k!

The overview is slow in any way, zooming is slow, dragging is slow.

I really thought these guys would soon come up with some kind of obvious speed improvements, but now another 2 months passed, AND IT IS EVEN SLOWER NOW. Seems to me that the guys are overchallenged or again starting to ignore this. Those ignorant answers from the support, oh man...

I found this:

- The performance is ok-ish up to a resoluton of ~2880x1800 Pixels. But with more pixels it starts to become suuuper slow.
- It doesn't matter what graphics card you have at all, the only counting is the CPU, and the usage of the plugins in the song

Sadly I use 4k usually. So I have to look for a tool that auto-switches to a lower resolution if Bitwig starts. Did not find any so far. Really, the guys could add this to Bitwig themselves!! Also they disabled the app properties option "low resoluton mode", which normally uses half the pixels/doubled pixels, so looks like fullhd then on 4k. I guess they disabled because the GPU does no do the scaling, so this trick does not work :3

Instead fixing this messy problem, they are adding other stuff again WTF

alexpen · Post by **alexpen** » Tue Apr 17, 2018 7:16 pm

sorry, double post.

gesslr · Post by **gesslr** » Tue May 22, 2018 8:56 am

nickallen wrote:The GUI is currently rendered entirely on the CPU using Cairo graphics library. The performance problems are not to do with our use of Java at all but just the shear number of pixels that have to be painted by the CPU and some areas where we haven't optimized the painting as much as we could (by reducing the painting to just the areas that needs updating and not painting layers that don't need to be for example). However, we are also working on offloading much of the painting to the GPU via OpenGL (at least for all the fast moving stuff like meters, oscilloscope and arranger/note editor). This will make a HUGE difference but I can't say when it will be ready - but rest assured we are aware of the issue and actively working to fix it by making use of the GPU in the long run. So the good news is we should be able to fix this and make it very snappy assuming you have a decent graphics card.

Just curious...has there been much progress on this since this was posted?

jarnold · Post by **jarnold** » Tue May 22, 2018 12:32 pm

This is being worked on and a new version leveraging the graphics card will be released, but it will take time. The word is months not weeks, but it will happen. Lowering resolution down to HD resolution will help in the short term until the fix is implemented.

Mister karloff · Post by **Mister karloff** » Sun May 27, 2018 2:47 pm

The lack of movement on this is unacceptable for a proffesional tool. Leaving us out here with minimal communication is a great way to have people spend money elsewhere.

viewtopic.php?f=259&t=485349&p=6808778#p6808778

viewtopic.php?f=259&t=488955&start=30

viewtopic.php?f=259&t=485184&start=15

pdxindy · Post by **pdxindy** » Sun May 27, 2018 2:58 pm

Mister karloff wrote:The lack of movement on this is unacceptable for a proffesional tool. Leaving us out here with minimal communication is a great way to have people spend money elsewhere.

nickallen wrote:The GUI is currently rendered entirely on the CPU using Cairo graphics library. The performance problems are not to do with our use of Java at all but just the shear number of pixels that have to be painted by the CPU and some areas where we haven't optimized the painting as much as we could (by reducing the painting to just the areas that needs updating and not painting layers that don't need to be for example). However, we are also working on offloading much of the painting to the GPU via OpenGL (at least for all the fast moving stuff like meters, oscilloscope and arranger/note editor). This will make a HUGE difference but I can't say when it will be ready - but rest assured we are aware of the issue and actively working to fix it by making use of the GPU in the long run. So the good news is we should be able to fix this and make it very snappy assuming you have a decent graphics card.

Mister karloff · Post by **Mister karloff** » Sun May 27, 2018 4:34 pm

Yes I gather that. My prefered way of working relies on lots of pixels and the only app that wont offload to gfx is Bitwig. I spent months trying to get an answer on forums and via tech support to no avail. All of my computers have gtx 9xx or better video cards. If I knew I was using cpu cycles and not gpu horsepower I wouldnt have purchased bitwig in the first place. During all my convos on forums and via support the mantra was upgrade to 2.xx when the developer knew what was going on.
People can spend as they wish. Bitwig has to earn my trust again. Ps. I hate having my 2 4k monitors set to 1080p

Seldome · Post by **Seldome** » Tue Jun 19, 2018 10:49 pm

Yep.. the same problem on iMac 5K. And i need to set low resolution (1080) for smooth works

rodanmusic · Post by **rodanmusic** » Fri Jun 29, 2018 6:12 am

See my post here for running it in low resolution mode:
http://www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewtopic ... #p=7109683

So far it runs super fast again with only slight bit of pixelation on my 27" iMac.

joule · Post by **joule** » Sun Jul 29, 2018 9:39 am

I just wanted to say that I tried the demo (2.35), but won't be interested in buying the software until this issue is fixed.

I'm under Windows 10 on 4k HiDPI on a fairly new computer. I haven't managed to provoke the most extreme GUI lags that some people mention, but the GUI is obviously "non-snappy" and rather sluggish. It seems like they're using fades/animations trying to cover it.

So.. fix your gfx engine, please. It should be top priority IMO.

Hanz Meyzer · Post by **Hanz Meyzer** » Tue Sep 25, 2018 10:25 am

FYI (I guess you already found out) the new and only crossplatform gpu way seems to be Vulcan/Molten, which is free on macOS, very similar to Metal and also a significant improvement over Apple's openGL:

https://github.com/KhronosGroup/MoltenVK

I wonder if MoltenVK is already supported in JAVA?

FortunOfficial · Post by **FortunOfficial** » Fri Oct 19, 2018 1:10 pm

And it looks like it’s still not being fixed. I hope they focus on performance, stability and bug fixing in the near future. For me this is more important than anything else.

Bitwig

KVR Audio

Sluggish/sloooow GUI Bitwig 2.23 macOS Sierra 10.12.6