Axiom's GUI bug/issue (very high CPU usage by simply keeping the GUI open)

[Silenceborn]

Hi there,

https://vimeo.com/349321646

Before anything else, I wanted to say that I just logged in after ages to make this topic as I'm super interested in buying the Axiom for my studio as I really enjoyed using such a high quality and dynamic amp modeller (e.g. I don't know what you guys did but that "Fat Drive" preset for example is unbelievably touch sensitive and dynamic for a digital modeller! ) and this is coming from a real amps fanatic who recorded and owned more than 20 vintage amps who rarely if ever enjoy using amp modellers. Saying that I have some serious problems with the app's GUI as explained here:

The issue I have in the Logic Pro X (v10.4.6 - currently latest as of July 2019) can be clearly seen in this screen capture video. In a newly opened project without any other plugins running with only one instance of Axiom, if I simply keep the GUI opened, the CPU and fans will go crazy (mostly on the first & second cores) until I close the Axiom's GUI which then all goes to normal %3~4 CPU usage only again while the Axiom is still enabled and being used. I must add that, when the GUI is open, if I don't feed it a signal and hence no animation happen on the GUI, the CPU will stay in normal range, but if for any reasons something changes on the GUI (e.g. meters, EQ curves animations, etc...) the CPU usage will go high again.
The interesting point is that the performance meter within Logic Pro itself does not show any significant change in activity at all which simply means that this is purely a bug/graphical glitch of some sort that has nothing to do with audio processing.

BTW, this issue IS NOT only limited to Axiom and can be experience with some other plugins as well (e.g. IK Multimedia Amplitube's GUI when on the CAB section, Overloud ECHOSON tape delay with the tape animation turned ON, 2nd Sense Wiggle synth, etc...). And before asking, yes I have switched from the integrated GPU to the discrete GPU and the problem still persists. In fact, this is NOT at all a GPU problem as the GPU usage/activity is usually very low even when the Axiom's GUI is open; the problem is that the Axiom's GUI for some weird reasons drains crazy amount of cpu power (again mostly on core 1 or 2) when is open. It seems to me that for some reasons the graphical user interfaces of some plugins put lots of pressure on the CPU for no apparent reasons. Saying that, again I have absolutely no other problems with the Axiom as when the GUI is closed it works very efficiently and uses very low CPU power which is great, although expected from this brand new Macbook Pro 2019.

As a side note, I use two Macbook Pro machines. First one that I made this video on is a new Macbook Pro 15" 2019 (Intel Core i9 - 8 cores) which is a super fast machine and I have no problems running any cpu intensive apps on it. And a second one which is a 2018 model of the Macbook Pro machine which I purchased last year as well. This problem occurs on both machines.

I also tried to replicate the issue on my Windows machines as well. One is a 2012 Asus ROG 17" quad-core and the other one is a relatively new Razer Blade 2018 15" (a beast of a laptop I must say). On both I run Ableton Live 10 and although the same problem exists on Windows machines, but is not as severe as on the Mac. On both Windows machines, some plugins's GUIs do indeed drain more CPU juice just by being kept open (maybe ~ 10-15% higher when the GUIs are open) but the problem is not at all comparable to what I see on the Macbook Pros.

Is that a GUI design problem? Bitmap issue? Is this only Retina related?

I use Intel Power Gadget, Mac OS Activity Monitor and iStat Menus apps to monitor the system performance. This is a very serious issue which I hope there is a fix for as I'm super excited about Axiom after using the demo and would definitely buy it if this problem can be fixed.

Cheers,

[Blue Cat Audio]

Thank you for your post. Glad that you like Axiom!

On a retina Mac display, you have twice the resolution, hence 4 times the number of pixels to transfer to the video card (compared to Windows). And Macs have been pretty slow/cpu hungry regarding bits transfers to screen since the move to Core Graphics. So it is not uncommon to see 30% CPU usage for simple meters updates (which by default happen up to 50 times per second in our plug-ins).

So you can maybe try one of the following:
1. disable the meters using the meters icon, in both Axiom and the amp sim (Destructor): this will completely get rid of this issue when the GUI is opened.
2. Open the global settings (again for each of Axiom and the amp sim) and change the output data rate to a smaller value (for example 20 Hz) - this may reduce the CPU usage while displaying meters or frequency analyzers.

By the way, you might be experiencing here a problem that was reported with the new core i9 Mac laptops: they tend to overheat very quickly and thus trigger throttling and reduce their frequency (at their ability to process data), so they can in the end be much slower than older Macs (!).

[Silenceborn]

Thanks for the response, much appreciated. Regarding the Retina displays, I think that is partly true, however, I'm running many other plugins with way more animations and heavy graphics happening without any issues at all! (e.g. Logic's Chromaverb, Sugar Bytes stuff which are very graphic oriented, FabFilter plugins, Rob Papen and many other graphics heavy synths, Native Instruments, SoundToys, etc...). I honestly think it all comes done to how the GUI is being designed. If as you said the problem was only limited to Retina displays then I should have problems with the above plugins as well, which I do not.

I think the problem should also be directly related to the GUI technology being used (mostly bitmap or similar) used in the GUI. And I'm quoting someone who had the similar problem and was also into graphic design that:

"Those work better in the non-retina days of old, and can be demanding of resources. They worked well when graphics were done by the (older generation) CPUs, but (most modern multicore CPUs) & GPUs aren’t especially well suited to render bit maps as the whole UI. This is almost certainly what is happening (and the reason it only happens on some screens could be that those screens have “animation” aka they increase the frame rate for drawing something and now the CPU/GPU has to render thousands of individual pixels each frame instead of a handful of textures and shaders like usual. Unfortunately doing UIs with bitmaps or similar technologies seems to be the standard for plugins, whereas everywhere else that practice died in 2002."

And regarding the CPUs on the new Mac Pro 2019, I'm pretty sure you are confusing the Macbook Pro 2019 with the Macbook Pro 2018 and earlier (which indeed have had cpu overheating issues). As the owner of 5 Macbooks in total and 2 new Macbook Pros (both 2018 and 2019) I must say that the newly released Macbook Pro 2019 does not have the throttling issue at all and based on the benchmarks are in fact about %10~15 faster than the same spec Windows machines. There are couple of videos on YT showcasing this as well if you wanna check them out.

Also as a side note, as I explained in my post, when the Axiom's GUI is closed, Axiom only uses about %3~4 cpu on my 2019 Macbook Pro which is incredibly efficient as the machine is very powerful. So again the problem I'm experiencing with the GUI has nothing to do with the CPU being overheated or throttling at all.

And please don't get me wrong, I'm here to report exactly as you suggested on your website's FAQ section. I know you might be biased towards your products which is totally fine and understandable, but as a potential customer I also want to be honest as well and be as detailed as possible solely for the hope of seeing possible solutions for such problems/bugs, as I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one experiencing it. In the Audio world, at least half the machines are Mac and almost all new Mac machines also have Retina displays as well...

Regards,

[Blue Cat Audio]

I am not saying there is no particular issue on our side here - can you maybe try reducing the output data rate as suggested to see if it changes anything?

We are not rendering the whole GUI as a single bitmap (it would be way to slow), but we are not using direct GPU rendering either (it can cause other types of problems, especially on Mac).

[Vaultnaemsae]

Hi, just chiming in on this thread to say thanks to BCA.

I've been having an issue with my mid-2015 MacBook Pro Retina's CPU usage/BC Axiom for a while.

The meter disabling tip above immediately cut Axiom's CPU activity registered in the Activity Monitor from a range of around 120-140% to a much friendlier 50-60% with standalone. The VST in Live 10 seems to have a slightly greater reduction with Live showing 45-50% use with only Axiom loaded.

Suggestion 2. to change the output data refresh rate to a value lower than 50Hz had no detectable effect on the CPU's performance.

I hope the good people at BCA can find a better solution because I'd really like the meters back!

[Silenceborn]

Well, I have tried couple of more things to remedy this issue as I explain here:

At first I connected different external monitors with 1080p and 1440p and 2160p (4k) and tried to run Logic Pro on Mac machines and Ableton Live 10 on Windows machines with all the problematic plugins loaded and their GUIs open. There is indeed a difference on various resolutions; with higher resolutions higher the CPU usage indeed when some plugins' GUIs are open. However, what I noticed was that for example all the Fabfilter plugins although having lots of graphics going on on their GUI never really put that much pressure on the CPU/GPU at all. At most maybe %4~5 on all their plugins; in compare to %25~35 on IK Multimedia plugins (mostly Amplitube 4) and couple of others including the BCA Axiom which when their GUI is open drains roughly ~%30 more CPU for no logical reasons (no extra audio processing happening while the GUI is open).

So I'm wondering if plugin developers can find out how Fabfilter is designing their GUI as they are super efficient both on CPU and GPU even when multiple instances of their plugins GUIs are all open while being used.

The second thing I tried was as you suggested to lower the output data rate in global setting on the Axiom, and there was almost no difference between different rates except if I go really low to like 5~10hz... which then yeah it helps like %10~15 which is still not good/efficient enough.

On the Windows machines in Live 10, with different resolutions and on external monitors, the GUIs are more efficient in compare to Mac when they are open, but some of the GUIs while open (including the Axiom) are still draining CPU usage on higher screen resolution settings.

All in all, I guess so far the best solution is to set them up and close the GUIs of the problematic plugins. However, for some plugins that one needs to tweak constantly like amp modellers or spectrum analyzers, the visual aspect is crucial and simply closing their GUIs would not be an ideal solution really.

Cheers,

[Blue Cat Audio]

After some more research here, it appears that changes made in recent Mac OS trigger unexpected data conversions while drawing come images on screen. We are currently looking at fixing this problem, which is clearly visible on retina displays.

[Vaultnaemsae]

OK, well I guess it will come as no surprise that it's also an issue with BC PatchWork. Which MacOS version started the issue? I just installed MacOS 10.14.6 and it's happening in this version.

[Blue Cat Audio]

It's hard to track, as it could have come with an update (Apple has made significant changes in their user interface and graphics backend, and it is probably not finished). Anyway, we can see similar issues on 10.13 too.

The good news is that it seems we can make rendering more than twice faster with the appropriate tweaks... Still working on it though!

[Vaultnaemsae]

That’s great that you’ve found a workable solution. I really though I was doing something wrong. Oh wait, I did — I updated MacOS!!! Always a problem...

[Blue Cat Audio]

Which version did you have before?

[Vaultnaemsae]

Yesterday (2019/07/24) I went to MacOS 10.14.6 from 10.14.5. However, I emailed BCA support in early April this year about problems while I was using 10.4.4. I had upgraded from 10.14.3 about a month earlier.

I was attempting to use the VG-99 as an audio interface and met trouble running A/B channels simultaneously (VG-99 outputs two virtual guitars simultaneously). The CPU meter in Live 10 was going nuts in dual-channel mode (over 80% up to 100+%) but I could get away with one channel at around 40-50% CPU. It seemed like software with such 2-channel functionality should be able to handle it but couldn't. Also, I could never get the buffer below 256 samples without serious popping and crackling (even crackles/pops a bit at 256!). Now with the meters off, I can get to 128 samples with reasonable performance.

I've been trying to do some recordings since a couple of weeks ago where the CPU spikes were such an issue when using BCA Axiom that I went over to using a hardware modeller. I thought that my MacBook Pro was not sufficiently powerful to run Axiom or that maybe I was killing the machine by running screen capture software simultaneously. In desperation, I even tried to set up a bootable external MacOS drive (I thought I maybe had a system problem) to see if it would run everything properly but had the same issues.

BCA told me back in April:
"Some presets may indeed be CPU intensive (presets using two amp chains with complex delays and effects). However the most simple ones (like a clean amp with just a reverb) should work with low latency on most machines.

By the way, are you using the mono to stereo audio configuration? It should save quite a bit of CPU compared to full stereo (which you do not need if playing bass or guitar). Also make sure that no other application is running in the background at the same time. The MacOS updater may also cause audio glitches when it is downloading updates (it may happen in the background without being visible)."

In hindsight, this was pretty unhelpful info and makes it sound like Axiom was designed for the most simple of applications. Axiom is extremely powerful -- when it works -- and I'm sure the designers had much more complex 'power user' scenarios in mind when it was designed/built.

Anyway, it's all starting to make sense now. Here's looking forward to a fix as soon as you guys can put one up because I (and others i'm sure) would like Axiom to be the primary guitar processing software in my workflow -- and it wasn't a small investment for me.

[Blue Cat Audio]

I am sorry our answer did not meet your expectations. In such situations it is pretty difficult to troubleshoot the issues as we may not have the exact same hardware configuration at the office. That's why our tip was to try with simple presets first, to see how it goes.

Even when the user interface thread gets busy, it is usually not a problem for the DSP, but in this case maybe there are bad interactions at the operating system level: overall CPU usage and DSP thread cpu usage should in most cases note be correlated. On a laptop though, it may induce performance reduction due to CPU overheat.

Anyway, we have just sent you a link to a preview by email. Can you tell us if it works better for you?

I (and others i'm sure) would like Axiom to be the primary guitar processing software in my workflow

That's indeed what it was designed for, and how it is used by many people!

[Silenceborn]

Ok, I have tried the new Demo of the Axiom on 4 Mac machines (including two Macbook Pros 2018 and 2019 models). And yes there is a significant difference with this version and there is roughly ~ %30 less pressure on both CPU/GPU when the Axiom's GUI is open while the output data rate is set at 50. However, although it's much better all around with this version, even with the meters visible on the GUI, there is still a significant jump in CPU usage when the meters are on or if I also open internal tweak windows within the Axiom where they also have extra meters and other visual features or animations.

In other words, after 15 minutes using the Axiom while the GUI & meters are visible on the main windows (without opening the internal tweaking windows), the temp went up to around 60~70c and by turning the meters off it goes down to around 50~55c degree; and by closing the GUI completely (while Axiom is still enabled and being used) the temp goes down to 40~45c! which is still a big difference, but much better than the previous version when the temp could easily go up to 80~90c or even higher while the GUIs were open. I must say though that although IMHO this version as well is far from perfect/ideal but a big thumbs up for BCA for improving the performance of their user interface!

I also did a test this time. on the Macbook Pro 2019 (i9- 8 core) and in Logic Pro, I opened two instances of Amplitube 4 with heavy presets, one instance of Axiom and couple of other effects (tape delay, EQs, compression, etc...) all under one track and realized that while *ALL* of them are enables and engaged, the CPU meter on Mac Activity Monitor won't pass even %5~7 total (around ~ %30 usage of the first core on Logic's performance meter) and temp around 45~50c degree which is very very impressive. But it's kind of funny that if I simply open their GUIs the cpu usage goes to about %30-35! and temp goes up to around %85~90c degrees! ...

It's kind of awkward and funny at the same time that by simply keeping the GUIs of some plugins open the CPU go crazy and temp jumps up to above 85~90 degrees! I just showed this to one of the friends who is a sound engineer and he could not stop laughing... after all these are all audio related tools and visuals should not in anyway waste such precious processing power.

Saying that, I can't even imagine having these plugins' GUIs open on a 4k or 5k monitor! That would be a nightmare and to be honest dangerous as if someone unknowingly leave the GUIs open on such super high resolution monitors, there will be a risk of damaging the components.

Regards,

[Vaultnaemsae]

Hope you didn't get me wrong about the info being 'unhelpful' - you guys are very communicative and it's appreciated. Your efforts and speed on this are immense!

I've tested the new preview (VST/Standalone). I deliberately created a complex stereo-path patch to push it a bit and that is definitely freaking it out at times. In particular, using Late Replies as a global effect has been problematic.

* Mid-2015 MacBook Pro Retina 15"/2.5GHz Intel Core i7 [https://everymac.com/systems/apple/macb ... specs.html]
* Sample rate: 48kHz / Buffer: 128 samples.
* Changing 50 Hz Refresh rates has virtually no bearing on readings with my system.

1. VST in Live 10 (*Activity Monitor = AM / Live 10 CPU Meter = LCM):
-As a baseline, bypassing the plugin (no other plugins) = 1-2% LCM / 10-15% AM.
-All Meters Enabled + Main GUI Open - 88-90% AM / 41-42% LCM (Open all subwindows -- Destructor, Late Replies -- for 150% AM).
-All Meters Enabled + Main GUI Closed - 57-63% AM / 41-42% LCM.
-All Meters Disabled + Main GUI open - 57-60% AM / 41-42% LCM (All GUI Open- windows open 85-90%).

Live maintains a level reading that isn't reflected in the Activity Monitor. Recording with VST is ok as long as I limit myself to one active instance at any given time and print/freeze tracks as I go.


2. Standalone App (Preview version only…overwrote the last version):
-As a baseline, minimizing the main GUI has no significant effect on the CPU.
-All Meters Enabled + Main GUI Open - 100-110% AM (Open all subwindows - Destructor, Late Replies -- for 160-170% AM).
-All Meters Disabled + Main GUI open - 70-75% (All GUI Open- windows open 85-90).

It's workable. Could it be improved? Have I overlooked any significant measurement?

I also like that new feature which you probably don't want to mention yet!