Sluggish UI and performance on Mac Studio M2 Max

[Skytouch]

Sluggish UI has been discussed previously, but I'm curious about Apple Silicon vs older Intel Mac. I've been running Bitwig 3 on a 2010 Mac Pro 5,1 / High Sierra / 5770 GPU without any graphical performance issues. Running Bitwig 5.1.2 on a 2023 Mac Studio M2 Max / Ventura 13.6.3 is slow to the point of being unusable.

What's puzzling is that when I uninstalled the app, I found a crash log containing:

Crashed Thread: 0 Dispatch queue: com.apple.main-thread

Exception Type: EXC_CRASH (SIGABRT)
Exception Codes: 0x0000000000000000, 0x0000000000000000

Termination Reason: Namespace SIGNAL, Code 6 Abort trap: 6
Terminating Process: BitwigAudioEngine-ARM64-NEON [753]

There's a lot more detail in the log, but Bitwig never hiccup'ed nor crashed. So I'm wondering if whatever generated this log is the cause of the sluggish behavior. By sluggish I mean nearly a second for the UI to redraw play button to stop button in the transport after I click it, settings window working correctly in one display and stalling in the other, and scrolling taking at least 1-2 seconds to respond to a mouse drag, then stuttering.

The error message "Namespace SIGNAL, Code 6 Abort trap: 6" shows up quite a bit in an online search, usually referencing a software coding issue.

I'll welcome others' experiences and suggestions, thanks!

Sky

[pdxindy]

Best thing is contact support.

How big is your project when that happens?

[BobDog]

Yeah, support sounds like the best bet.

BW on a M1 here runs at about 50% efficiency of an equivalent Intel machine, so not great. But the UI is absolutely fine. It also only seems to use the performance cores, efficiency cores are not used at all as far as I can see.

Is it bad just with an empty project?

[lb24569]

It also doesn't help that Bitwig doesn't use GPU acceleration for its UI rendering currently, but apparently it's on the roadmap to be improved.

[pdxindy]

BW on a M1 here runs at about 50% efficiency of an equivalent Intel machine, so not great.

My 16" MBP M1 Pro is faster than my previous 16" maxed out last gen intel MBP.

My studio machine is an M2 Pro Mac Mini and it is significantly faster than the last gen Intel Mac Mini I had previously.

I have not noticed any sluggish behavior on either, but then my projects are on the simpler side with generally no more than 25 tracks or so.

[Jac459]

Yeah, support sounds like the best bet.

BW on a M1 here runs at about 50% efficiency of an equivalent Intel machine, so not great. But the UI is absolutely fine. It also only seems to use the performance cores, efficiency cores are not used at all as far as I can see.

Is it bad just with an empty project?

Are you talking bout laptops?

I used to run on an m1 8gb/256gb and it was faster than my Razer 32gb i7 6 months older.
Now I am on a M2 pro with 16gb and I throw at it everything I want without any slowness and issue. The UI seems to run at 60hz... Smooth...

And I forgot to say that I run in low perf in order to get about 8 hours battery...

So you surely have a bug.

[Skytouch]

Wow, thank you for all your replies. I contacted Bitwig support and Jogi followed up. This morning I re-installed Bitwig 5.1.2 from scratch and behavior seems better. I note a few small issues; such as selecting Settings Shortcuts tab for the first time, but fine after that. BW5 is not as snappy as BW3 on my old Mac 5,1 but satisfactory.

I'll mark this as resolved but return here if anything else comes up.

Best,
Sky

[BobDog]

BW on a M1 here runs at about 50% efficiency of an equivalent Intel machine, so not great.

My 16" MBP M1 Pro is faster than my previous 16" maxed out last gen intel MBP.

My studio machine is an M2 Pro Mac Mini and it is significantly faster than the last gen Intel Mac Mini I had previously.

I have not noticed any sluggish behavior on either, but then my projects are on the simpler side with generally no more than 25 tracks or so.

There was a recent thread here about m1 performance, I did the checks, same project on my m1 only managed half the tracks of the i7 iMac I have here even though the m1 kills the i7 in benchmarks. I’ll find the thread…

Here it is: viewtopic.php?t=604832

Maybe you could test the project from there on your m1?

On my m1 it manage about 18 tracks before starting to fall apart, on the i7 it managed 38 tracks.

At no point did BW use the m1 efficiency cores for audio processing.

It would be interesting if your figures are different, might give us some idea why it is so bad here.

[BobDog]

Yeah, support sounds like the best bet.

BW on a M1 here runs at about 50% efficiency of an equivalent Intel machine, so not great. But the UI is absolutely fine. It also only seems to use the performance cores, efficiency cores are not used at all as far as I can see.

Is it bad just with an empty project?

Are you talking bout laptops?

I used to run on an m1 8gb/256gb and it was faster than my Razer 32gb i7 6 months older.
Now I am on a M2 pro with 16gb and I throw at it everything I want without any slowness and issue. The UI seems to run at 60hz... Smooth...

And I forgot to say that I run in low perf in order to get about 8 hours battery...

So you surely have a bug.

Maybe you could also run that test, I’m not the only one. I did the test as I was surprised at the performance from another user who wanted to get rid of the m1 because of bad BW performance.

[Jac459]

Maybe you could also run that test, I’m not the only one. I did the test as I was surprised at the performance from another user who wanted to get rid of the m1 because of bad BW performance.

Well I did run the test for a while as I was working equally on my m1 and my Razer "beast". My Razer was a 4000 euros 15 inch 4k touchscreen OLED with a 2080 maxQ, 32gb i7.
The M1 was supposed to be my chead low-end laptop to make music while out l, or to sketch music. Then I started to discover than my Razer wasn't in fact able to run the songs I was easily sketching on the M1... That's why I moved to a MacBook Pro, I am a windows guy initially.

[Paterfiets]

Yeah, support sounds like the best bet.

BW on a M1 here runs at about 50% efficiency of an equivalent Intel machine, so not great. But the UI is absolutely fine. It also only seems to use the performance cores, efficiency cores are not used at all as far as I can see.

Is it bad just with an empty project?

Isnt Bitwig utilizing the efficiency cores at all ? Does anybody has some info about this as I am close to buying a new laptop..

[BobDog]

So I did another test, Diva, default patch, three note chord.

M1 managed 20 tracks.
I7 (10th gen) managed 32 tracks.

The M1 really doesn't seem to use the efficency cores, in the attached image the M1 is at 50% total cpu with the 20 tracks playing. Adding anymore tracks causes audio nightmare.

Screenshot 2024-01-19 at 10.38.25.png

The I7 though uses all cores and hyper cores and manages 32 tracks.

Screenshot 2024-01-19 at 10.44.40.png

[joris.roling]

Just as a reference, my new MBP M3 Pro gets 66 tracks with Diva (CLAP) before maxing out (stutter in audio)

[BobDog]

Could you take a screen dump of the cpu gauges?

(And just to check, 3 note cords, one bar, looped)

[Jac459]

I think we need to precise the mode in Diva.
I am at 24 tracks in great with 1 bar loop, chord of 3 notes and battery mode "low power". M2 Pro.

I am at 80 tracks in draft with 1 bar loop, chord of 3 and battery mode set to normal .