Waldorf LARGO SLOW GUI Problems, vote please !

[Igro]

Good news, that Wolfram completely know about it.

[ekeaze]

[M.L.M.]

I have the same problem here with the laggy GUI.

The Guys from Waldorf say that this is a BUG from Windows 7 and the Graphik Card.

And they dont do something, because they can not reproduce this BUG.

[ekeaze]

I has had same problems with Win XP and W7... but they told me same sh... like to you.

[Igro]

I have the same problem here with the laggy GUI.

The Guys from Waldorf say that this is a BUG from Windows 7 and the Graphik Card.

And they dont do something, because they can not reproduce this BUG.

Did you read the topic? See 1 page for Wolfram message. He said he will take care of it. The most interesting thing is that id depends of hardware as well. Please post you full system configuration here like mine(see as example):

Dual Core Duo T2300, 1.66Ghz. x86. Mobile Intel 945 Express Chipset Family . RAM 2Gb(DDR2 PC2-5300(DDR2 667)).DAW: Energy XT2.

[M.L.M.]

Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate
Version 6.1.7600 Build 7600
Motherboard Asus-P5K
Systemtype x64-basierter PC
Prozessor Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Quad CPU Q8200 @ 2.33GHz, 2331 MHz, 4
BIOS-Version/-Datum American Megatrends Inc. 1201, 14.10.2008
RAM Adata 8,00 GB 1066Mhz
Ati Radeon 5770 New One / Geforce 8800GT Old One (same Problem)
Digidesign Asio Mbox2 Driver
DAW.: Presonus Studio One Pro, Cubae 5 Trial
Elicenser Syncrosoft Dongle

[Megakazbek]

Hmm... it's more than just a "performance" problem as Waldorf people think (or even not a performance problem at all!). If it was a purely performance problem, the interface would be slow, but still drawn correctly. However, Largo interface sometimes doesn't redraw some things. For example, when switching from Envelopes to Effects, sometimes Effects page does not show up at all and you have to switch to it again for it to be drawn properly.
Also it isn't likely that it's a problem with GDI+ or video drivers or anything like that because there are thousands of VSTs with GUI perfectly working for everyone. Seems more that Largo itself sometimes forgets to update its GUI for some reason.

[Igro]

For example, when switching from Envelopes to Effects, sometimes Effects page does not show up at all and you have to switch to it again for it to be drawn properly.

Indeed! It happens to me as well. Also some graphic glitches appears time to time.
Even GUI dragging is slow(it takes time from dragging from one position to another, sometime it creates GUI cascades, tails like)

[DiScO197]

Interesting this thread seems to be just for Windows. I'm on a Mac Pro and I have nothing but trouble with Largo 1.50. Terribly sluggish GUI, spinning beach balls when changing patches (or at least trying in that awful browser) and Logic 9 suffers as well with the playhead freezing and faders becoming unusable whilst Largo makes it mind up. I have scores of plugins and they work flawlessly so I think I can rule out a computer problem. It's a fresh install as well and everything works great bar Largo. I have got one other synth actually that causes graphics problems as well and it uses the protection dongle as well. Wether that has anything to do with it I don't know. Would be interesting to hear from other Logic / Largo users out there.

Cheers.

[Igro]

I just wanted to write a message to Waldorf to know do they started some workarounds with this. Cos it's been a while.

Besides a slow GUI, i also have some CPU raises frequently - 3 minutes project play fine, then CPU overloading. After pressing my DAW stop button, i should wait a few minutes till it goes down. I think slow GUI and this CPU thing are related.

I have a few last projects stopped by this issue.

[Igro]

Interesting this thread seems to be just for Windows. I'm on a Mac Pro and I have nothing but trouble with Largo 1.50. Terribly sluggish GUI, spinning beach balls when changing patches (or at least trying in that awful browser) and Logic 9 suffers as well with the playhead freezing and faders becoming unusable whilst Largo makes it mind up. I have scores of plugins and they work flawlessly so I think I can rule out a computer problem. It's a fresh install as well and everything works great bar Largo. I have got one other synth actually that causes graphics problems as well and it uses the protection dongle as well. Wether that has anything to do with it I don't know. Would be interesting to hear from other Logic / Largo users out there.

Cheers.

You can drop a message to waldorf support to get some info about their progress in fixing this. And don't forget to write your full system configuration.

[DiScO197]

Interesting this thread seems to be just for Windows. I'm on a Mac Pro and I have nothing but trouble with Largo 1.50. Terribly sluggish GUI, spinning beach balls when changing patches (or at least trying in that awful browser) and Logic 9 suffers as well with the playhead freezing and faders becoming unusable whilst Largo makes it mind up. I have scores of plugins and they work flawlessly so I think I can rule out a computer problem. It's a fresh install as well and everything works great bar Largo. I have got one other synth actually that causes graphics problems as well and it uses the protection dongle as well. Wether that has anything to do with it I don't know. Would be interesting to hear from other Logic / Largo users out there.

Cheers.

You can drop a message to waldorf support to get some info about their progress in fixing this. And don't forget to write your full system configuration.

Thanks. I have done several times over the last few months and generally the only response I get is well it works ok here. I get more pleasure out of Waldorf Attack. The GUI on that works fine with no problems so whats so different? Lots I expect but not being a programmer I wouldn't have a clue. I have barely used Largo since purchasing it when it came out as it's just too unstable for me even though it sounds great. Hope someone else is having the same issue so it can get sorted. Should have bought the Blofeld.

[Igro]

Interesting this thread seems to be just for Windows. I'm on a Mac Pro and I have nothing but trouble with Largo 1.50. Terribly sluggish GUI, spinning beach balls when changing patches (or at least trying in that awful browser) and Logic 9 suffers as well with the playhead freezing and faders becoming unusable whilst Largo makes it mind up. I have scores of plugins and they work flawlessly so I think I can rule out a computer problem. It's a fresh install as well and everything works great bar Largo. I have got one other synth actually that causes graphics problems as well and it uses the protection dongle as well. Wether that has anything to do with it I don't know. Would be interesting to hear from other Logic / Largo users out there.

Cheers.

You can drop a message to waldorf support to get some info about their progress in fixing this. And don't forget to write your full system configuration.

Thanks. I have done several times over the last few months and generally the only response I get is well it works ok here. I get more pleasure out of Waldorf Attack. The GUI on that works fine with no problems so whats so different? Lots I expect but not being a programmer I wouldn't have a clue. I have barely used Largo since purchasing it when it came out as it's just too unstable for me even though it sounds great. Hope someone else is having the same issue so it can get sorted. Should have bought the Blofeld.

As Wolfram said, the problem is this:

t's not a bug so there is no "fix". It's a performance problem obviously depending on some components of the PC in question.

The reason is that I chose a Windows functionality Microsoft developed a couple of years ago and introduced in Windows XP called GDI+. This GDI+ was supposed to replace GDI, which was good since GDI is really outdated and misses a great lot of functionality Largo needs to display its GUI.

Microsoft made the more or less wise decision to perform the GDI+ functions completely in software and ultimatively sending the resulting bitmap to the graphics accelerator. Wise in that that was what Apple always did with their QuickDraw and Quartz 2D and which served them well for more than 20 years.

However, as it looks, Microsoft were (and are) still not able to achieve even a good percentage of the performance Apple was able to get out of their routines. It sometimes feels as if some routines are written in Visual Basic or Java rather than well-optimized C or assembly code that might use features of the CPU to some extent. So, they extended GDI+ to use hardware acceleration in Vista SP2 and Windows 7, which was again wise (if you can compare graphic speeds between XP and Vista or W7 on your various systems, please tell me the results). Apple also switched to hardware acceleration of their drawing stuff starting in 10.4 with Quartz Extreme.

Now, for Windows 7, Microsoft developed a completely new set of functions to achieve faster graphics performance called Direct2D. This new package is also available for Vista but not for Windows XP. And, because it tries to be as performant as possible, its functionality is very different from GDI or GDI+. So, this would mean a major rewrite of the graphic stuff of Largo while still maintaining the GDI+ code to make sure it not only runs on W7 and properly updated Vista installations but also on XP, which is still one of the most popular "DAW operating systems".

So, my choices are:

* Switch back to GDI. Not good for Vista and Windows 7 since GDI is now routed to GDI+ internally and probably has the same performance problems there. Good for Windows XP, though.
* Switch to Direct2D. Lots of work and renders Largo incompatible to Windows XP. Would mean I have to maintain two completely different graphic engines to assure XP compatibility.
* Switch to OpenGL. Very performant for 3D graphics but quite unsuited for 2D graphics. I *could* find my way through it but it would probably be a very inefficient method of rendering a GUI like Largo's.
* Switch to a completely different graphic framework. There are a couple of interesting frameworks out there but since implementing one or the other of them into Largo just to make some benchmarks takes a lot of time, I couldn't start doing so yet. Those graphic frameworks very often also render the graphics purely in software, but it looks like their developers programmed a "bit" more optimized for speed than Microsoft.

All in all, I'm a bit stuck right now. I am aware of the graphic performance problem on some Windows machines but right now I don't have the time to work on a major rewrite of the graphic stuff. I can only tell you that it has the highest priority on my list and I will take care of it in the near future.

The poll is interesting but it would probably be more helpful to know the computer configurations as well, i.e. CPU and GPU type, and RAM. I developped and tested Largo on a MacBook Pro with ATI Radeon X1600. I did notice that graphics is considerably slower with Windows XP (booted natively with BootCamp) than with Mac OS X but no CPU spikes here. It might only happen with NVIDIA graphic accelerators, don't know, though.

But, as I said, I will work it out, but cannot do so right now. I hope you have patience and I apologize for the inconvenience.

If you have helpful comments that could help me making a decision which graphics framework to use, drop me a mail on wolfram/at/franke/dot/net or wmf/at/waldorfmusic/dot/de.

Best wishes,


Wolfram

[rob_lee]

Hi

Wolfram Franke asked me to post this message i just recieved back from him..
As a Waldof Blofeld and Largo beta tester im not able to discuss hardware/software or the workings of the above mentioned but below you will find a fair answer to the issues you users and i/us beta testers also have.
I'll also post this message on the Waldorf boards as asked.
Please read the email below

Hi Rob,

(please forward this text to the KVR forum and maybe to our user-forum, if you like)

It's not a bug so there is no "fix". It's a performance problem obviously depending on some components of the PC in question.

The reason is that I chose a Windows functionality Microsoft developed a couple of years ago and introduced in Windows XP called GDI+. This GDI+ was supposed to replace GDI, which was good since GDI is really outdated and misses a great lot of functionality Largo needs to display its GUI.

Microsoft made the more or less wise decision to perform the GDI+ functions completely in software and ultimatively sending the resulting bitmap to the graphics accelerator. Wise in that that was what Apple always did with their QuickDraw and Quartz 2D and which served them well for more than 20 years.

However, as it looks, Microsoft were (and are) still not able to achieve even a good percentage of the performance Apple was able to get out of their routines. It sometimes feels as if some routines are written in Visual Basic or Java rather than well-optimized C or assembly code that might use features of the CPU to some extent. So, they extended GDI+ to use hardware acceleration in Vista SP2 and Windows 7, which was again wise (if you can compare graphic speeds between XP and Vista or W7 on your various systems, please tell me the results). Apple also switched to hardware acceleration of their drawing stuff starting in 10.4 with Quartz Extreme.

Now, for Windows 7, Microsoft developed a completely new set of functions to achieve faster graphics performance called Direct2D. This new package is also available for Vista but not for Windows XP. And, because it tries to be as performant as possible, its functionality is very different from GDI or GDI+. So, this would mean a major rewrite of the graphic stuff of Largo while still maintaining the GDI+ code to make sure it not only runs on W7 and properly updated Vista installations but also on XP, which is still one of the most popular "DAW operating systems".

So, my choices are:

* Switch back to GDI. Not good for Vista and Windows 7 since GDI is now routed to GDI+ internally and probably has the same performance problems there. Good for Windows XP, though.
* Switch to Direct2D. Lots of work and renders Largo incompatible to Windows XP. Would mean I have to maintain two completely different graphic engines to assure XP compatibility.
* Switch to OpenGL. Very performant for 3D graphics but quite unsuited for 2D graphics. I *could* find my way through it but it would probably be a very inefficient method of rendering a GUI like Largo's.
* Switch to a completely different graphic framework. There are a couple of interesting frameworks out there but since implementing one or the other of them into Largo just to make some benchmarks takes a lot of time, I couldn't start doing so yet. Those graphic frameworks very often also render the graphics purely in software, but it looks like their developers programmed a "bit" more optimized for speed than Microsoft.

All in all, I'm a bit stuck right now. I am aware of the graphic performance problem on some Windows machines but right now I don't have the time to work on a major rewrite of the graphic stuff. I can only tell you that it has the highest priority on my list and I will take care of it in the near future.

The poll is interesting but it would probably be more helpful to know the computer configurations as well, i.e. CPU and GPU type, and RAM. I developped and tested Largo on a MacBook Pro with ATI Radeon X1600. I did notice that graphics is considerably slower with Windows XP (booted natively with BootCamp) than with Mac OS X but no CPU spikes here. It might only happen with NVIDIA graphic accelerators, don't know, though.

But, as I said, I will work it out, but cannot do so right now. I hope you have patience and I apologize for the inconvenience.

If you have helpful comments that could help me making a decision which graphics framework to use, drop me a mail on wolfram/at/franke/dot/net or wmf/at/waldorfmusic/dot/de.

Best wishes,


Wolfram

Thanks

Rob

As i posted a while back..Testing of Largo is still ongoing as is testing the Blofeld.
Waldorf are busy with the Musikmesse preparations atm but you need to email Wolfram direct as i spoke to him about this thread:

wmf/at/waldorfmusic/dot/de

I too have graphic problems but only some of the time in Studio One Pro/Sonar 8.
Largo works best for me in Live 8.

Thanks

Rob

[Igro]

I have barely used Largo since purchasing it when it came out as it's just too unstable for me even though it sounds great.

Same goes for me now. Can't make music now(Graphic issue are making huge CPU overloading), just some presets creating.