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Testing Mac GUI performance with Hive 2.1 beta 2021-01-21T12:35:47+00:00 Hi everyone, as you might know, some of our users are experiencing problems with sluggish or lagging GUIs for some time now. In the past, one workaround that often helped was to set the display's colour profile to sRGB IEC61966-2.1. However, in the most recent macOS Big Sur, this might not help anymore. We spent the last two months trying to come up with a solution for this , and identified some settings which can drastically improve the GUI rendering. As this problem heavily depends on a multitude of known and unknown factors, we need you to test these options, so we can find out which settings are working best on all kinds of system configurations. Factors playing a role include the operating system, the DAW, the plugin format (often it's the AU version causing problems), the graphics card, used display and resolution. Even the cable used to connect the display to your Mac might influence the behaviour. Most often it happens when using Retina or other high resolution displays, and some hosts often mentioned are Ableton Live and Logic. If you have been affected by this issue, please give it a try and let us know which settings work best for you. You can test this with the current Hive 2.1 public beta, which you will find over here: https://www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=31&t=559585 Here is how you can test: Ideally, set the colour profile of your display to the one that comes with your display . You can set the profile in your Mac's preferences, just choose "Displays", and then go to the "Colours" tab to select the appropriate profile. The options are not available directly in the plugin, but rather in its preferences file. This file is called com.u-he.Hive.Preferences.txt . You can edit this file with any simple text editor. If you don't know where to find it, just open a new Finder window, and from the Go menu choose "Go to Folder" . Paste in the following line (all of it, including the tilde character), and click Go. This will automatically open the right location in the user library. ~/Library/Application Support/u-he Every time before you change one of the options in the preferences text file, you need to unload the Hive plugin from the host project. Then change the setting, save the file, and load a new instance of the plugin. Otherwise the setting might not change. There are three different settings, and we need to test how they all interact. V_PROPERTY name='Preference' id='0' value='AllViews:Cocoa Draw Async: ' It's just two options for this one: * YES * NO V_PROPERTY name='Preference' id='0' value='AllViews:Cocoa View Update Strategy: ' Here you can set the following options: * AUTO * SMART * TIMER * FORCED V_PROPERTY name='Preference' id='0' value='AllViews:Cocoa View Cache Bitmaps: ' This one has four options as well: * SMALL * LARGE * ALL * NONE If you want to, you can even set the frame rate to your liking. But remember that higher frame rates come at the cost of higher CPU consumption. V_PROPERTY name='Preference' id='0' value='AllViews:Editor Frame Rate:30' We found that, for Hive, it generally seems best to set the Draw Async option to YES. That's where you can start, if you experience problems with the default setting. Please note that, if you are using the AAX version in Pro Tools, setting Draw Async to YES will result in a small problem with the gamma settings of the plugin GUI. We will try to correct this for the final release of the update. If this improves the GUI behaviour, you can keep it set to YES, and continue by testing different combinations of the Update Strategy and Cache Bitmaps settings. Things to look out for: * How smooth do the GUI controls react to your actions * Is the preset browser reacting instantly to preset changes, or with a delay * How smooth does the scope run * Is your host UI still running fine, or slowing down while the plugin GUI is visible * How does the CPU load differ between the different options * How does it run if multiple instances of Hive are loaded, and all are displaying their GUI at the same time * Is there a difference in the GUI performance when using different GUI sizes for the plugin With some combinations of settings, the performance stays stable in all GUI sizes, other combinations cause a slowdown with larger sizes, or draw more CPU. Some settings deliver a smoother scope animation, but at the cost of increased CPU demand. If you test this, please let us know which settings work best for you, and also provide some information about your setup : * What kind of Mac are you using * Which macOS version * Which graphics card * What kind of display (incl. resolution and frame rate) * Which DAW (Logic, Live, Cubase, ...), and which version of it * Which plugin format did you test it with (AU, VST2, VST3, AAX) Thanks a lot for helping us out on this, we really appreciate your help. Cheers, Tas tasmaniandevil https://www.kvraudio.com/forum/memberlist.php?mode=viewprofile&u=62450

Ploki Ploki https://www.kvraudio.com/forum/memberlist.php?mode=viewprofile&u=221865: KVRAF; 6780 posts since 17 Dec, 2009

Post by Ploki » Sat Mar 06, 2021 11:41 am

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I use LG UltraFine 4K at 1:2 resolution (4096x2304 displayed as 2048x1152) with display lid on the laptop closed. But M1 macs GPU performance is heaps better than anything else i had before, and scaled resolutions actually work fine.
I just prefer the crispiness of 1:1 display

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