Performance on M1 Macs

[scally1138]

I was able to run 24 Arturia vst3 Jupiter 8s all playing 4 note chords, i think it was 128 buffer, M1 Mac Mini 8 gig of ram.
It all depends on the plugin. I have the Knif Audio Knifonium and that thing is an absolute monster on some patches, maybe even just able to run one instance.

[Tj Shredder]

I am absolutely happy with my MB Pro M2. Never could make it stutter. Its even faster than my 2013 10-core Mac Pro… What a relieve compared to my former Macbook Air. It stays absolutely silent, never ever heard the fan jump in…
It needed repair though (the thunderbolt board was broken) but since then its simply great…

[moxxi]

It stays absolutely silent, never ever heard the fan jump in…

Yep, sometimes I wonder if my MBP 16 M1 even have fans

[Tj Shredder]

Just checked with Geekbench. Its the fastest single-core performance of all Macs.
(I measured 1916) Even in intel mode the single core performance is faster than any Intel Mac. (1453)
The Mac Studios of course beat it in Multicore performance mine is 8875
And in Rosetta its still on 6911…
My 10-core Mac Pro 6,1 delivers 694 single core and 6492 multicore… The M2 is even faster in Rosetta mode…
What this means for music making is the question…

[JorjhanC]

OK because I'm an idiot and hate sleep apparently, I ran the test again.
I'm getting 20 Diva instances in VST2 and VST3 natively. This is not bad, I just foolishly figured it would beat the 12 core Xeon here. What I see in Activity Monitor points to it using the Performance Cores and stacking 5 per core before crackling. Compare this to the Mac Pro with 12 cores getting only two instances per core, but eking out 24 by sheer core count.

What's interesting and weird is other DAWs for the most part performed quite worse with the 12 core, so DP11 for instance just smokes on the M1 so far. Again this is comparing a laptop to a workstation, the 12 core 3.33ghz Xeons are still good chips. DP11 has a "live mode" which is supposed to make it more like Bitwig and Live, tomorrow I'll see how it adds up without the rendering and buffering that it does to boost track count.

BTW the other reason I got the Air is it's never twice as powerful. The number quoted was 1.7 times and that looks accurate when you see the Geekbench scores.

Hi mate, I was just wondering. Do you need to set up your bitwig to use all of the cores or something like Logic Pro does?, I'm new with Bitwig, coming from Logic Pro, so I'm wondering what is the best option to have a good cpu performance.

Thanks

[machinesworking]

Hi mate, I was just wondering. Do you need to set up your bitwig to use all of the cores or something like Logic Pro does?, I'm new with Bitwig, coming from Logic Pro, so I'm wondering what is the best option to have a good cpu performance.

Thanks

So unlike Logic Bitwig runs everything essentially in real time, and unlike Logic it's pretty good at it. For the most part track counts in Logic will be higher though, just to let you know. Like my tests show though, in certain instances with certain plug ins Bitwig sores.

Bitwig uses all of the cores, that process isn't a tweak-able preference in Bitwig. The main ones are the typical buffer settings for your audio interface, and Bitwigs sandboxing.

So there is apparently some CPU eaten by the "Individually" setting in Bitwig, but it's also the safest as in a crashing plug in will not take down Bitwig or your computer. Maybe someone else has other tricks but in my experience Bitwig has only buffer settings and hosting plug ins in Bitwig as slight CPU savers.

[JorjhanC]

Hi mate, I was just wondering. Do you need to set up your bitwig to use all of the cores or something like Logic Pro does?, I'm new with Bitwig, coming from Logic Pro, so I'm wondering what is the best option to have a good cpu performance.

Thanks

So unlike Logic Bitwig runs everything essentially in real time, and unlike Logic it's pretty good at it. For the most part track counts in Logic will be higher though, just to let you know. Like my tests show though, in certain instances with certain plug ins Bitwig sores.

Bitwig uses all of the cores, that process isn't a tweak-able preference in Bitwig. The main ones are the typical buffer settings for your audio interface, and Bitwigs sandboxing.

So there is apparently some CPU eaten by the "Individually" setting in Bitwig, but it's also the safest as in a crashing plug in will not take down Bitwig or your computer. Maybe someone else has other tricks but in my experience Bitwig has only buffer settings and hosting plug ins in Bitwig as slight CPU savers.

Awesome!, thanks for the input. Do you know where do I change from "Individually" to "Sandbox" and viceversa?

Thanks a lot

[machinesworking]

Hi mate, I was just wondering. Do you need to set up your bitwig to use all of the cores or something like Logic Pro does?, I'm new with Bitwig, coming from Logic Pro, so I'm wondering what is the best option to have a good cpu performance.

Thanks

So unlike Logic Bitwig runs everything essentially in real time, and unlike Logic it's pretty good at it. For the most part track counts in Logic will be higher though, just to let you know. Like my tests show though, in certain instances with certain plug ins Bitwig sores.

Bitwig uses all of the cores, that process isn't a tweak-able preference in Bitwig. The main ones are the typical buffer settings for your audio interface, and Bitwigs sandboxing.

So there is apparently some CPU eaten by the "Individually" setting in Bitwig, but it's also the safest as in a crashing plug in will not take down Bitwig or your computer. Maybe someone else has other tricks but in my experience Bitwig has only buffer settings and hosting plug ins in Bitwig as slight CPU savers.

Awesome!, thanks for the input. Do you know where do I change from "Individually" to "Sandbox" and viceversa?

Thanks a lot

Preferences/Settings/Plug ins