zebra 2 & cpu

[rainguitar]

Hi,

I've been listening to the sound demos and they sound great! I'm very interested in buying this product but, at the moment, I'm running Logic Pro 8 on a first generation intel iMac(1.83) with 2 gigs of ram. I'm about 8 months away from replacing it so whether or not I buy Zebra 2 immediately depends on it's cpu comsumption. If this is a cpu hungry animal I may have to wait until I get the new machine. Any advise?

Thanks

Greg

[beej]

You'll be fine. Z2 was really quite usable on my old PPC 1.25 Powerbook, as long as you didn't expect mucho polyphony and really complex patches. That's about a quarter of the power of your machine.

Remember that being semi-modular, patches can vary significantly in CPU consumption, but you'll be surprised how complex even simple patches can sound.

But all that aside, you can find out yourself by running Z2 on your machine in demo mode. I think you'll be fairly happy with the performance you get...

[rainguitar]

Thanks BeeJay,

Am I right that you're the same person whoso helpful on the Logic Forum?

Greg

[beej]

You've seen through my thinly-veiled disguise...

[rexlapin]

Greg,
I have the same setup (with only 1GB of RAM) and Zebra works fine.
You won't regret picking it up.
Cheers,
Scott

[fgimian]

For what it's worth, I'm on PC and Zebra2 is actually one of the most CPU efficient plugins I own, just slightly higher than Thor in Reason 4.

And as the guys have mentioned, it sounds amazing!

[zircon]

I am a huge fan of Zebra 2. I would not put it as highly CPU efficient overall, however, but efficient when compared to comparable "modern" synths such as Sylenth or Massive. For example, previous-generation softsynths like Synth1 or Pro-53 are considerably more efficient. On my old Pentium 4 computer (3ghz), I would often use up to 15% of my processor in a single patch, whereas most other softsynths I was using, which were slightly older, did not use nearly that much. But next to something like Nexus, it's far more lean.

Of course now I have a Q9450 so it really doesn't matter either way

[liars&ashes]

----I'd say it varies greatly really, but I have noticed you can often trim down a patch a little and make it almost 2X as cpu efficient without hardly losing any of the real sound. If you're on a singlecore machine, about 10% of the patches will cripple ya ha-ha, but the rest will vary greatly, and there are a lot that only took 3%-5% on my old 2.4Ghz P4.

Jeff

[tylenol]

a first generation intel iMac(1.83) with 2 gigs of ram.

I use it on a 1st gen macbook (2ghz) with 2gigs of ram, and it's fine. Like the others said, because it's a semi-modular it's possible to really use a lot of CPU, but most patches don't. One caveat is that patches with XMF filters (which I tend to use a lot), especially ones that use both XMF modules, do tend to eat a bit more CPU. But the regular filters are pretty CPU efficient. You should check out the demo, the built-in patches have a pretty good sampling of what the synth is capable of and what kind of CPU those capabilities will use.