Bazille and CPU/Resources and performance

[holoniverse]

I think Bazille has the best set of presets which I like for my music. I love sequenced, layered sounds, arps etc.

Those are naturally a bit more resource intensive.

I was wanting to ask if the limits I see on my setup are due to misconfiguration, "natural" limits, or whatever.

I run bitwig on linux. My box is already 2 years old or so, but was one of the latest gamer PCs I could get at that time. The only thing I do save on is graphics card. I usually just use presets and fiddle a bit on cutoff and other parameters, so I wonder if *that* is maybe a reason?

I have 64GB DDR5 RAM.
CPU is 12-core (8-mt/4-st) 12th Gen Intel Core i7-12700KF
I use a Presonus AR Studio12 external audio mixer which is my audio interface.
Graphics:
Device-1: AMD Navi 24 [Radeon RX 6400/6500 XT/6500M] driver: amdgpu

I should think this to be a pretty powerful setup.

Nevertheless, if I try to load Bazille as a VST3 inside bitwig, then playing the most interesting presets soon cranks the CPU gauge to the max, sometimes clipping. Only the simpler patches work without issues.

So when I want to record something with Bazille, I would make sure I have everything else already as audio only, and if not, bounce that first to audio, then disable other plugins, do the bazille thing, and then bounce that to audio disk, disable Bazille again, before moving on.

I feel like I am kind of limited, because I always am afraid of hitting the limits, and feel like I am not able to take advantage of the full potential of this wonderful instruments.

I have already tried setting the Multicore switch, which helps a bit, but not too much.

Is it a linux-only issue? Is there anything else I can tweak? Should I run Bazille in a dedicated computer and only record its audio (doesn't fit my workflow very well though)? I don't think it does, but would upgrading the CPU help? What else could be done?

I remember the Creamware Pulsar setup I used to run 20 years ago. The cool thing about that was that all audio stuff was delegated to the DSPs on the card, alleviating the CPU. Is there some similar setup which could work for Bazille and other u-he synts and effects I own? An external DSP gear of sorts that works today? It should work with linux in my case.

I appreciate any suggestion.

[Fannon]

Yes, your machine sounds like it should be fast enough. But your Intel CPU has fast and slow cores. Maybe you need to check that Bazille isn't run on the small cores. Not sure how Linux or your DAW is allocating this.

What DAW are you using? Could you try out and compare with Reaper?
What audio buffer size are you using? This makes a big difference. Better go with 256 or 512 when you're live-playing and more if you don't need real-time.
I don't think a DSP would help you here as Bazille runs on your CPU. Maybe if you could run your other plugins that support it into DSP, to offload something away from your CPU. But buying a CPU with more cores would probably be cheaper and more versatile.

Personally, I got a Ryzen 5950X because it only has big cores. It can run ~15 instances of Bazille (depends on presets) at the same time even at 128 buffer size, but this is cutting it close. Increasing buffer size to 512 and I can add more than 20. For sure I didn't have any problems adding Bazille to Projects where a lot of other things were already going on. I'm on Windows with Bitwig and use CLAP.

[holoniverse]

Wooooow - 15 instances...I can't even think of this...I am envious for sure.
As I said in the post, I also run bitwig. My buffer size is currently at 1024, just to minimize issues, but I should be fine at 512. I will go back experimenting with this for sure.

I don't have another DAW, but it looks to me a good suggestion, just to try narrowing things down. I think reaper has a free version or at least demo mode so I could try that.

I am also going to review some cpu benchmarks, and consider upgrading there.

Thanks for the good response.

[Fannon]

Yes, Reaper you can basically use for free, at least to try this out.

But I would expect your machine to be faster and also handle more Bazille instances. Buffer of 512-1024 should be fine, then the problem is likely CPU bound.

Is there a way in Linux to disable the tiny cores or assign only the big cores to Bitwig?

[Fannon]

Btw. I looked on some CPU benchmark and while your CPU has maybe 20-25% lower multi-core benchmarks, it has also better single-core performance.

If you figure out the root cause of the unexpected differences, I'd be interested. The u-he plugins may not be optimized for each CPU architecture equally, but it was actually the Ryzens which were not running as fast as to be expected (and this was fixed for at least some synths).