Arturia Pigments 3 is out!

[pixel85]

Here's a patch to test the CPU of your system. I didn't pay any attention to the CPU demand while programming it on my studio system but I moved it to this system and the patch will choke it out in five seconds by holding only one note. It's a really simple sound but reducing the polyphony to three will take the CPU demand down while still allowing the patch to "breathe".

It kills AMD 3900x with one note in Cubase 96k project. Changing buffer up to 1024 doesn't help.
I could set Poly to 4. 5 is too much.

I feel like 15(?) years ago when I was trying Massive

This is crazy because I can throw so many Massive X, Repro or Super8 synths in a project and everything is fine. Either additive synths became ultra CPU heavy or they really have to work on optimization.

[ClayUlti]

Check your Arturia account, i have a crossgrade offer so i can buy pigments for just 70€

[4damind]

In Legato mode, the CPU load is not a problem, not even with Unison. However, some presets like "Alien Impact" are very heavy and sometimes reach 50% on my system when playing a chord. I don't know why. Unison is often rather small and Polyphony is often not very high with 6x.

[EnGee]

I tried "Alien Impact" (48khs/128 sample) in Studio one this time and the most it reaches is 20% with some chords of three notes.

[4damind]

The DSP display in S1? In Cubase it shows about 20-25% too with 4 notes but the Arturia usage display on the right bottom shows about 50%.

[EnGee]

No, it's Pigments display.

[Teksonik]

Yes, this one is heavy, but I could play it without any crackles or clicks The CPU is max %71.

Thanks. Yes I can run it on my studio computer and didn't pay any attention to the CPU demand while I was making the patch. When I moved it to this system it destroyed it in five seconds by only playing one note and FL's meter went over 90%. Orion's meter went to 116% before it completely choked out.

I thought it would make a good test patch for gauging Pigment's demand.

[Teksonik]

Now try the patch I posted above....

52% @41kHz 12ms latency on Renoise.

With one note playing ? That's about what I was getting on my studio system.

You can reduce the Poly from 8 to 3 and that will drop the demand while still allowing the patch to "breathe". Reducing Amp Release can help but it starts to choke the sound pretty quickly.

[Teksonik]

It kills AMD 3900x with one note in Cubase 96k project. Changing buffer up to 1024 doesn't help.
I could set Poly to 4. 5 is too much.
I feel like 15(?) years ago when I was trying Massive
This is crazy because I can throw so many Massive X, Repro or Super8 synths in a project and everything is fine. Either additive synths became ultra CPU heavy or they really have to work on optimization.

Yes it kills this system in five seconds with one note. But this is my old internet system so I don't expect too much from it. Just scared the crap out of me when I tried the patch on this system and it melted down into total audio chaos in five seconds.

As you say reducing the Poly brings it way down.

But I'm afraid Pigments could use some optimizations. A simple patch that uses only a Harmonic Engine and a Sample Engine with no Granular shouldn't use that much CPU.

I've made many more complex sounds in other synths that barely move the CPU meter......

[sQeetz]

With one note playing ? That's about what I was getting on my studio system.

You can reduce the Poly from 8 to 3 and that will drop the demand while still allowing the patch to "breathe". Reducing Amp Release can help but it starts to choke the sound pretty quickly.

Yes, just holding one note on the M1 Macbook ~50%. Reducing poly to 3 also reduces CPU usage to 20-22%

[zzz00m]

Here I exported the preset. This file you can import. It should end up in the user bank.

Pigments_Preset_Contemplate Tek_20210501_18h55.zip

I tested this preset in Pigments standalone. Nice sound!

Was able to run it at 48KHz, 64 sample buffers (1.3ms) without glitching. At any higher sample rates, it fell apart.

Pigments was showing up max 91% utilization internally, which coincided with Windows Task Manager displaying one CPU core running at ~90%. The other CPU cores were idling, and the overall CPU use was reading a low 19%.

By cutting the partials in the harmonic engine by half to 256, and the polyphony to 4, I was able to keep it under 40%.

[Teksonik]

Thanks! I really wasn't paying attention to the CPU demand of the patch just getting to know the Sequencer (which I like a lot).

Still I think Pigments tends to be on the high side of CPU demand. I don't think I'll be using seven instances of it in a project like I did with Dune 3 recently.

Doesn't Ableton have Multi-threading ?

[tactile_coast]

Quoted from the Pigments 3.0 pop out help menu.

'Watch your partials
Polyphonic patches using more than 128 Partials may overload your CPU. If that's the case, limit your Partials to 128 or less. You can still have high-frequency content by setting a higher Ratio or applying FM'

The Teksonic patch uses 512 Partials four times the stated safe CPU maximum. Presumably Teksonic created it to test the extremes of different configurations in handling the new engine. It doesn't in any way reflect on the general performance of Pigments as it falls far outside of the designated operational parameters.

[zzz00m]

Doesn't Ableton have Multi-threading ?

Yes, but that probably doesn't work the way you might expect it to.

If I run one instance of Pigments 3 in Ableton Live 11, it all gets processed on one CPU thread/core. 2 for 2, 3 for 3, etc. If I run 6 instances of Pigments, it uses all 6 threads/cores. So six instances is pretty much the upper limit for my i5. To get 6 running well at the same time I had to limit the partials to 128. And up my buffers to 512...

I think that is how all of the DAWs I've tested with recently seem to behave with virtual instruments. I don't think parallel processing for one instance of an instrument is widely available.

I've had a similar challenge with SampleTank 4 being a CPU hog. In theory you can load up to 16 instruments in an instance of ST4. But whoa, all that runs on one DAW thread, so the only way to multi-thread that is to use several instances of ST4, with each getting it's own thread to run on, and usually not putting more than 4 instruments in a single ST4 instance.

[Teksonik]

Pigments was showing up max 91% utilization internally, which coincided with Windows Task Manager displaying one CPU core running at ~90%. The other CPU cores were idling, and the overall CPU use was reading a low 19%.

One note in Pigments nothing else running on this system:

CPU 050221-1.png