u-he

gentleclockdivider · Post by **gentleclockdivider** » Sat Nov 28, 2015 6:00 pm

Almost all guis of the newer plugins need a lot of ram memory .
Bazille has a rdicilously oversized pane/knobs ( which is scaled down when adjusting the size ) but are still loaded in ram l .
I have a big screen attached to my ( old ) dual core laptop, but bazille is almost unplayable because of the graphics ( nothing to do with cpu and voices )
Currently only zebra is not using this new ( gui ) approach , and performs great .
Please rethink this approach , or do scalabele vector graps without the need to keep huge sized graphics in ram

Have a look at madrona labs aalto , future proof and no overhead ( not talking about audio thread )

EvilDragon · Post by **EvilDragon** » Sat Nov 28, 2015 6:02 pm

Thing is - not everybody wants the flat looking vector GUI. Oversized graphics that are scaled down are pretty cool, especially when details are concerned.

Thankfully we're in 64-bit world now, and having 16 GB of RAM or more isn't really a problem.

ghettosynth · Post by **ghettosynth** » Sat Nov 28, 2015 6:07 pm

EvilDragon wrote:Thing is - not everybody wants the flat looking vector GUI. Oversized graphics that are scaled down are pretty cool, especially when details are concerned.

Thankfully we're in 64-bit world now, and having 16 GB of RAM or more isn't really a problem.

That's what I was thinking. Since the guis don't really impact audio performance, please, keep the big good looking guis coming.

I will say though, props to madrona labs, Alto is a cool synth. I'm cheap so I only have the CM version, but I do like it.

rod_zero · Post by **rod_zero** » Sat Nov 28, 2015 6:31 pm

I love Aalto GUI, but u-he is developing his own style since Diva. I like DIva, Satin and Presswerk. Bazille is a little tight. Hive is also good.

Using u-he plugs requires a powerfull computer, so I really don't get how much RAM a gui can take that affects performance, you must have quite small RAM.

V0RT3X · Post by **V0RT3X** » Sat Nov 28, 2015 6:37 pm

I find that out of all the U-he plugins I own, that bazilles GUI takes the longest to load.

It's slightly annoying everytime i need to do an adjustment and have to wait half a minute for the GUI to load before i can adjust a control. Maybe this is just in Bitwig?

I havn't tried it in any of my other DAWs.

pdxindy · Post by **pdxindy** » Sat Nov 28, 2015 6:48 pm

EvilDragon wrote:Thing is - not everybody wants the flat looking vector GUI. Oversized graphics that are scaled down are pretty cool, especially when details are concerned.

Thankfully we're in 64-bit world now, and having 16 GB of RAM or more isn't really a problem.

I wonder if a low resource skin could be made?

scintillator · Post by **scintillator** » Sat Nov 28, 2015 7:08 pm

The problem is not only RAM but also (mostly?) graphic cards. Some of them are not good enough for some UIs - and I mean average cards. As vst plugins are for audio, not video, making heavy UIs is quite wrong, IMO. Latest OpenGL required, layers upon layers of PNGs, etc. - why? How does this make it sound better? If the card cannot cope it passes the task to the processor which is busy with other tasks -> throttles -> dropout. Then another dropout. So what happens if I'm recording live? Buy the best card? Sorry, but NO.

xx JPRacer xx · Post by **xx JPRacer xx** » Sat Nov 28, 2015 7:09 pm

You can get 16 GB RAM for less than $100.

ghettosynth · Post by **ghettosynth** » Sat Nov 28, 2015 7:13 pm

V0RT3X wrote:I find that out of all the U-he plugins I own, that bazilles GUI takes the longest to load.

It's slightly annoying everytime i need to do an adjustment and have to wait half a minute for the GUI to load before i can adjust a control. Maybe this is just in Bitwig?

I havn't tried it in any of my other DAWs.

Which is only a little bit, say 30 to 60x, of exaggeration. It's noticable compared to alto, but I wouldn't notice it in most cases. Interestingly, Arturia's SEM is noticeably faster than AltoCM. Diva is between Alto and Bazille, and FM8 about the same as Alto.

I'm not getting the complaint at all. If you want to complain about load times, try loading MFL for the first time in Live, now that's slow!

ghettosynth · Post by **ghettosynth** » Sat Nov 28, 2015 7:14 pm

scintillator wrote:The problem is not only RAM but also (mostly?) graphic cards. Some of them are not good enough for some UIs - and I mean average cards. As vst plugins are for audio, not video, making heavy UIs is quite wrong, IMO. Latest OpenGL required, layers upon layers of PNGs, etc. - why? How does this make it sound better? If the card cannot cope it passes the task to the processor which is busy with other tasks -> throttles -> dropout. Then another dropout. So what happens if I'm recording live? Buy the best card? Sorry, but NO.

I couldn't even tell you what graphics card that I have, I'd have to look. I don't game much at all. It is the cheapest NVIDIA card that did 4K when I purchased it, I'm sure that it was around $100, maybe as much as $150, but I don't think so, and certainly not more.

ksandvik · Post by **ksandvik** » Sat Nov 28, 2015 7:16 pm

UI screen drawing is one of the most minor CPU resource drains with any plug-in -- unless someone wrote extremely poor code hogging the main thread all the time and so on.

ksandvik · Post by **ksandvik** » Sat Nov 28, 2015 7:17 pm

V0RT3X wrote:I find that out of all the U-he plugins I own, that bazilles GUI takes the longest to load.

It's slightly annoying everytime i need to do an adjustment and have to wait half a minute for the GUI to load before i can adjust a control. Maybe this is just in Bitwig?

I havn't tried it in any of my other DAWs.

You should talk to Bigwig -- on my system Bazille loads pretty fast with both Logic and Ableton Live. I suspect Bitwig's use of Java for their UI has to do with this issue.

Elektronisch · Post by **Elektronisch** » Sun Nov 29, 2015 10:49 am

Actually i did noticed also that Uhe plugin UIs do take quite much of recources. For some it might not really be important, but the recource requiriment makes whole UI a bit slugish and aswel influence other plugins a bit when making simple tasks. For example when bazille UI is opened other plugins movement cant be a little bit slower and it doesnt matter how many RAM you have

I have 16 gigs of ram but when there are many U-He plugins opened the expierience becomes a bit slugish

I dont know how some other developers are overcomming but the difference when opening and using plugin is different. For example compare Synthmaster, Dune 2 performance of UI

Urs · Post by **Urs** » Sun Nov 29, 2015 11:41 am

The main factor for slow UI open in our stuff was (!) the number of controls and graphics. The more knobs whatsoever on the screen or hidden in tabs, the longer the loading time. This was due to a search algorithm that went through each object even if it's the same object that was previously searched for. As each object is queried at least 5 times in a row during setup, this created a waste of time. We now first check if the object being looked for is the same object that was previously looked for. As a result, the UI open time has been reduced dramatically in our latest updates. If your UI opens slowly, check if you have revision 3893 or later.

Other than that, graphics are a factor, naturally. Ever since we introduced GUI resizing people asked for higher esolution graphics. For some time we added HD image packs to, I think, Satin and Diva (not sure). These were received very well and so we decided to add high resoution graphics by default. Now Bazille, Presswerk, Diva and Hive come with HD graphics that are scaled down to whatever UI size you have. Graphics are only loaded if needed and cached in memory in the resulting size, to speed up drawing later. Knob images are loaded in background after the UI is opened.

What I'm saying is, we've pretty much squeezed every single bit of performance and quality out of bitmap based UIs there is. I believe that any further improvement in speed will be a compromise in visual quality. There are a few plug-ins where we could improve the object hierarchy, but those should be marginal things.

That said, it would be easy for us to offer downsized "eco" graphic packs. Furthermore we're toying with the idea of offering fully vectorized skins with no bitmaps at all. Latter would load in no time at all but they would tax the CPU a bit more during drawing. Which in turn might force us to adopt OpenGL or similar as our drawing environment.

We'll see...

tl;dr -> check if you're using the latest versions (revision 3893) because UI opening was improved vastly over previous builds.

- U

Grizzellda · Post by **Grizzellda** » Sun Nov 29, 2015 12:08 pm

Urs, aren't vectors really the way to go, ultimately? I'm thinking in terms of fundamental flexibility, the best user experience interacting with the GUI of a plug-in. Do you think that improving this type of technology is worth the effort?

I do!

u-he

KVR Audio

All new guis are sucking valuable resources