Arturia Pigments 7

[Cuauhtli]

I use a laptop i5 (10th gen) Win 10, Ram 12 GB, graphics chip unknown. Pigments takes a few seconds to load, same as Amplitube and some others. Less than 5 seconds.

[zerocrossing]

What operating systems do those PCs run? As I said before there is some reason why load times are long for some users but not others. Mine loads in 4 seconds here on Windows 11. Some people reporting long times are using Win 10 and Mac OS.

I don't know if that's a clue or not. CPU/GPU/HDD vs SSD could also play a role.

For the record I like Pigments a lot but obviously the slow load times reported by some and the high RAM usage need to be addressed by Arturia if they care to do so. Failing to address the issues in a timely manner is just negative press for them.

It's been a problem with all updated Arturia plugins for a while. Whoever's their new UI person has traded realism for resources. If you look, every key on the virtual keyboard is a unique graphic. Every knob is a unique asset, and think of that as being multiplied by each knob position. In my opinion, this is wasteful, even if you have a huge SSD.

[zerocrossing]

I use a laptop i5 (10th gen) Win 10, Ram 12 GB, graphics chip unknown. Pigments takes a few seconds to load, same as Amplitube and some others. Less than 5 seconds.

Amplitube takes forever to load on my i9 with 36 gb and a nice Nvidia graphics card. Bitwig gives me a warning that there might be a problem that it's taking so long. They're another company that laughs at resources. Those amp faces are all big, high resolution graphics. Stupid. I don't need to see a photorealistic amp on my simulation. Look at how Native Instruments does it. You get the idea of what amp you're using, but it doesn't waste screen space or RAM.

[chk071]

Definitely a lot of differences between the way different developers render/draw the GUI. Or, ressource management in general.

[Cavey Arrgh]

I have a bog standard Dell desktop i3030, from Costco, nothing fancy. 32Gb ram. Win11. i7 14700 I think.

Arturia FX and synths load in 3 seconds or less, and even Massive X takes less than 5. I only say this to make the point that even "standard" PC configurations are complicated and varied across users, so I understand why plugin companies can't always optimize or fix issues for everyone.

I have stops and crackles when using my DAW (Reason 12, also happens with Reaper), even though I have a separate dedicated USB card for my MOTU M2 to connect to. So I have issues as well, just different ones. I've tried all the PC tweaks known to man, nothing completely solves it. The separate USB card helped the most.

[IvyBirds]

What operating systems do those PCs run? As I said before there is some reason why load times are long for some users but not others. Mine loads in 4 seconds here on Windows 11. Some people reporting long times are using Win 10 and Mac OS.

I don't know if that's a clue or not. CPU/GPU/HDD vs SSD could also play a role.

For the record I like Pigments a lot but obviously the slow load times reported by some and the high RAM usage need to be addressed by Arturia if they care to do so. Failing to address the issues in a timely manner is just negative press for them.

It's been a problem with all updated Arturia plugins for a while. Whoever's their new UI person has traded realism for resources. If you look, every key on the virtual keyboard is a unique graphic. Every knob is a unique asset, and think of that as being multiplied by each knob position. In my opinion, this is wasteful, even if you have a huge SSD.

However if you install the ENTIRE V Collection, every single instrument, it will use less than 50 GB. Thirty GB of that is the Augmented Instruments that have significant sample libraries. Augmented Voices being the largest at 6GB and Augmented Brass being 3GB

So that means if you strip out the Augmented Instruments with their large sample libraries you end up with 37 total instruments in just 20GB of space and that includes some with sample libraries like the CMI, Synclavier, Mellotron, and E-II

Sorry not sorry that in 2026 when even budget hard drives are SSD and measured in TB that I am not worried about 20GB of space to install 37 instruments, despite that fact that many of them have tiny graphics files of individual keys measured in KBs

[noiseboyuk]

the initial GUI load of v7 takes at least 20 seconds on my M1 macbook pro.

FWIW it's about 2-3 seconds on my M2 macbook (non pro), Sonoma, V7.

[HcDoom]

Loading time isnt the issue at all - issue is that each instance eats between 1 and 2 GB of RAM.

[Teksonik]

It's been a problem with all updated Arturia plugins for a while. Whoever's their new UI person has traded realism for resources. If you look, every key on the virtual keyboard is a unique graphic. Every knob is a unique asset, and think of that as being multiplied by each knob position. In my opinion, this is wasteful, even if you have a huge SSD.

Are all realistic GUIs as RAM hungry? I have several others from other developers that are not as hungry as Pigments which is not an emulation of any hardware unit and lacks a realistic virtual keyboard and realistic knobs.

I just tested the only other two Arturia synths I own which do have realistic knobs and virtual keyboards and got:

Jup-8-V4 317 megs

SQ-80V 371 megs.

That compares to Pigments: 2.3 Gigs

Both the Jup and SQ are within the range of other synths I own such as Dune 3's 260 megs for a single instance. All tested synth's GUIs were set to similar sizes although of course not pixel for pixel exactly the same.

I was working on a project today that has: Speedrum with a sampled kit, Flex x 2, Dune 3 x 4 and one instance of Avenger and the total ram showed as 1.8 gigs, 500 megs less than a single empty instance of Pigments. This is using the RAM meter in FL Studio which itself may not be dead accurate but gives a baseline for comparison.

For the record my studio system has 32 gigs of memory and I don't normally use large sample libraries so usage is never a concern here but something is definitely out of range with Pigment's RAM demand especially considering the blank preset I used to test with, no samples (other than the noise samples) and no loaded FX.

Even though I don't suffer from the long load times others are reporting and RAM is not an issue here these issues should be addressed by Arturia if for nothing else to give a logical explanation as to why they exist.

[felis]

I like the look and sound of Arturia's stuff, but they're grossly inefficient.