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From the first day on, I had the idea that things that went pretty quick on my 5 year-old windows PC, took much longer on my brand new Mac Pro (12-core, 48GB RAM).
Now I'm testing a project that I've done on my old PC and its clear that the Mac Pro is lacking. I set up the whole mix from scratch, that the Mac had no chance to be influenced by things the PC could have done, that could trouble the Mac in any way, that might be carried over by simply running the same worksheet on the Mac.
The result is that I could easily could finish the whole project on my old PC, with use of 50-60% CPU use, while on the Mac I'm not done with the mix, let alone the mastering process, which I use to do in the same worksheet, and the Mac shows a CPU use of well over 80% and is creating lots of artifacts in the music, which I never had on my old PC.

My understanding is that in DAWs, plugins chains per channel are directed to a CPU-core/thread and since my Mac has double the amount of cores/threads, I'd think that every core would get half as many chains to process, than my 6-core PC. Also, my PC was showing about 30-35% total CPU-use in the Task Manager, while the Mac is showing 17% on the Activity Monitor, so I'm not sure why I'm getting artifacts, while there's so much power not in use, asking less from the Mac than the PC has shown to be able to do.

Of course it would be unthinkable that a $10,000 Mac Pro get easily outperformed by $1500, 5 year-old PC, so I assume there must be something wrong in the settings, that prevents the Mac from dividing the tasks properly, but so far I havent been able to find anything that could explain, or fix this problem.

Anyone who can advise me on how to get proper performance from my new Mac Pro? I already worked through the setup procedure posted on the Presonus website and tips for better performance I was able to find by googling.

Cheers!
Maarten
______________________________________________________
PC: Mac Pro 2019, 12-core, 48GB RAM
Software: OS Monterey, Studio One 6 Pro
I/O: Quantum 2626
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by PreAl on Mon May 03, 2021 8:21 am
Check performance of plugins within studio one itself. It's hard to really point to anything without more specifics and detail. Maybe make a video.

Also check/adjust your buffers and dropout settings etc..

Intel i9 9900K (Gigabyte Z390 DESIGNARE motherboard), 32GB RAM, EVGA Geforce 1070 (Nvidia drivers).
Dell Inspiron 7591 (2 in 1) 16Gb.
Studio One Pro 6.x, Windows 11 Pro 64 bit, also running it on Mac OS Catalina via dual boot (experimental).
Presonus Quantum 2626, Presonus Studio 26c, Focusrite Saffire Pro 40, Faderport Classic (1.45), Atom SQ, Atom Pad, Maschine Studio, Octapad SPD-30, Roland A300, a number of hardware synths.
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by PreAl on Mon May 03, 2021 9:07 am
Oh and another thing, try putting your plugins on separate channels and buses rather than stack em up on a single channel.if you have a lot of them.

Intel i9 9900K (Gigabyte Z390 DESIGNARE motherboard), 32GB RAM, EVGA Geforce 1070 (Nvidia drivers).
Dell Inspiron 7591 (2 in 1) 16Gb.
Studio One Pro 6.x, Windows 11 Pro 64 bit, also running it on Mac OS Catalina via dual boot (experimental).
Presonus Quantum 2626, Presonus Studio 26c, Focusrite Saffire Pro 40, Faderport Classic (1.45), Atom SQ, Atom Pad, Maschine Studio, Octapad SPD-30, Roland A300, a number of hardware synths.
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by shanabit on Mon May 03, 2021 10:23 am
1. StudioOne runs better on PC the same as Cubase
2. Each core is used up on Mac before it uses the next available. It is not dynamic
3. Increase your audio block size
4. Higher cores is not better than faster cpu when it comes to speed
5. Xeon server cpus are not the bees knees. You are better off with a single cpu with higher clock speed
6. Try increasing dropout protection under audio device processing

StudioOnePro 6.1
UA Apollo Twin
OSX Sonoma 14.2

iMac 2013
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by reggie1979beatz on Mon May 03, 2021 12:26 pm
I find that frustrating. Studio One has put a lot of time into optimizing lately, why is the Mac different?

Also, just in general, it's HARD to find core performance increases in CPU's w/o overclocking (which is unstable on my machine though not mac)

Bye......:roll:
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by musicchamber on Tue May 04, 2021 5:20 am
reggie1979beatz wroteI find that frustrating. Studio One has put a lot of time into optimizing lately, why is the Mac different?

Also, just in general, it's HARD to find core performance increases in CPU's w/o overclocking (which is unstable on my machine though not mac)


I would def contact support over this. I fail to see how this can be so bad! I have xeon cores on my iMac Pro (14 cores), It would be interesting to do a comparison. Your new Mac should def be a lot faster than my iMac Pro etc. If you could think up a test we could do as a comparison (if you have the time) I would be able to participate etc

Best,
Scott

Studio One Professional v6, Apple iMac Pro 14 core, 128gb memory, 4TB SSD. macOS Ventura, Main audio interface is RME Babyface Pro. Presonus 192, DP88 (not currently used), RC500, ADL600, Focusrite ISA430, TC4000 reverb, SPL Phonitor, Monitoring: Event Opal, IK Multimedia MTM Studio Monitors x 5, DMAX audio Super Cubes. HD800s mastering reference headphones. Sequential Prophet 12, Prophet 12 modules x4, E-MU 4XT Ultra, Roland Fantom 8, Korg Pa3x, Roland Fp7-F, MOTU midi express 128, Xkey air 37, Studiolive CS18, Atari STE with Notator plus loads of microphones and plugins etc
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by jBranam on Tue May 04, 2021 10:02 am
audio workstation performance is based on single core performances. multi-core performance does not help that much imo no matter how many cores you have. but the more cores you have the more instruments and such you can run.

in audio work anything in 'series' has to be placed on a single core for timings and delay compensations and whatnot. all DAWs have to work within the series constraints. it does not matter if effects are on other channels/tracks/busses etc... if they are within the series they have to be on the one core.

now if you have say three virtual instruments for example they can be run parallel (on different cores... this is where multi-core systems help) and everything in series behind them are placed on their core (in series)

at least this is my understanding of it (if i am wrong correct me) some DAWs use multiple cores better than others but they ALL have to abide by the 'series' constraints. it can be rather confusing because most people think many cores means better performance and that IS the case with other work like video but single core performance is the bar when it comes to audio work hence why audio work is SO demanding on any system even today.

cheers


jay

p.s. check single core performance on both the new mac and the old pc and see if the pc single core performance is better than the mac. that may answer why the mac seems to not do as well as the old pc.

“Life is so constructed, that the event does not, cannot, will not, match the expectation.”

Knot Hardly Productions
¯\_ { ͡• ͜ʖ ͡•} _/¯
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by robertgray3 on Tue May 04, 2021 10:52 am
reggie1979beatz wroteI find that frustrating. Studio One has put a lot of time into optimizing lately, why is the Mac different?

Also, just in general, it's HARD to find core performance increases in CPU's w/o overclocking (which is unstable on my machine though not mac)


I think it has something to do with how macOS assigns things. As another poster mentioned, Cubase on Mac is also much more limited in terms of available processing power compared to is PC counterpart.

https://www.pro-tools-expert.com/produc ... erformance

It would appear that processing power available to third party applications is starting to become outstripped by identical PCs. That tells me it’s likely an OS related limitation.

Mac OS X Catalina 10.15.7
Mac Pro 6.1
3 GHz 8-Core Intel Xeon E5
32 GB 1066 MHz DDR3
Dual AMD FirePro D500 3072 MB
Quantum 2
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by reggie1979beatz on Tue May 04, 2021 11:50 am
I just find it hard to believe that in the year 2021 we're still worried about such things :(

We pay good money for machines that perform poorly? Remember my thread about upgrading my computer? I gave up because of how many people saying the number of cores isn't as important as an improvement on core size. Why spend the money?

I will say one thing though, even on my paltry PC I can usually get away with multi instances and doze says it's spreading it out.

Bye......:roll:
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by PreAl on Tue May 04, 2021 12:07 pm
You can be running HAL or Deep Thought, and you will still need to optimize your computer for DAWs, and you may still run into problems with dodgy software or software settings that needs to be optimized. One of the reasons I don't go with Mac is that there is a limit to what you can do to optimize the OS, Windows on the other hand is tweak central, I have a lot of tweaks I apply to Windows which I have gathered over decades of use and it works bloody excellently on the most part. Having said that my Hackintosh runs pretty damn well but I always dual boot back to Windows.

Another reason is that there seems to be no accepted universal standard for plugins to be able to multitask optimally under a DAW application (or a bare minimum). Attempts have been made in the past and have failed (Cakewalk springs to mind, unfortunately I can't find the actual post).

If you manage to run well without any optimization you are lucky, but you can always do better. I'm running an i9 9900K and it still needs optimizing. Getting my Dell laptop to work without dropouts was a nightmare as well but I got there in the end, had to learn a bunch of new things for that (working around a high latency non fixable ACPI.SYS).

Intel i9 9900K (Gigabyte Z390 DESIGNARE motherboard), 32GB RAM, EVGA Geforce 1070 (Nvidia drivers).
Dell Inspiron 7591 (2 in 1) 16Gb.
Studio One Pro 6.x, Windows 11 Pro 64 bit, also running it on Mac OS Catalina via dual boot (experimental).
Presonus Quantum 2626, Presonus Studio 26c, Focusrite Saffire Pro 40, Faderport Classic (1.45), Atom SQ, Atom Pad, Maschine Studio, Octapad SPD-30, Roland A300, a number of hardware synths.
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by robertgray3 on Tue May 04, 2021 4:46 pm
PreAl wroteOne of the reasons I don't go with Mac is that there is a limit to what you can do to optimize the OS, Windows on the other hand is tweak central,


Exactly. I’m a happy Mac user but I’ve come to terms with the fact that you very much work with what you’re given, and that amount may decrease if they so choose. From my experience when Pro Tools first went Native vs now, that amount has in fact gone down relative to Windows over the years. Mac’s (often changing) approach to their OS definitely has had an affect on how well cross platform frameworks run, so any dev using those takes a performance hit. Logic runs really well on those new Macs /shrug

Mac OS X Catalina 10.15.7
Mac Pro 6.1
3 GHz 8-Core Intel Xeon E5
32 GB 1066 MHz DDR3
Dual AMD FirePro D500 3072 MB
Quantum 2
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by Demious on Wed May 05, 2021 5:08 am
I see that indeed the plugins use much more CPU than they did on PC (a plugin that does 5-6% on my PC does 9% on my Mac), which should not be possible. I was told that the CPU power on Mac is not comparable with that of a PC, as in you'd need a much higher CPU in a PC than you would need on Mac, to get the same performance. I've got the highest speed CPU available on a Mac Pro, 4.4GHz in turbo mode, which should outperform any PC CPU.

PreAl wroteOh and another thing, try putting your plugins on separate channels and buses rather than stack em up on a single channel.if you have a lot of them.


I'm not sure if I get this right. It sounds to me that you mean put one plugin on a channel, feed the output to another channel, add one plugin there, feed it through a third channel, add a plugin there, etc. That would make up to 7 or 8 channels per track, the mixer would become insanely large, but to say very confusing with like over a 1000 channels, not counting aux and bus channels.

shanabit wrote1. StudioOne runs better on PC the same as Cubase
2. Each core is used up on Mac before it uses the next available. It is not dynamic
3. Increase your audio block size
4. Higher cores is not better than faster cpu when it comes to speed
5. Xeon server cpus are not the bees knees. You are better off with a single cpu with higher clock speed
6. Try increasing dropout protection under audio device processing


1. Maybe when it come to CPU speed, but it really doesnt, in the end. On PC I'm constantly getting all kinds of strange bugs preventing me from continuing to work on my mix, that show once, or once every so much time, that are impossible to recreate and to pin-point. It only happens in a single song file and it cant be fixed, leaving me with one option: start the mix from scratch. For a single bug, I've been talking to support for over 9 months without any progress and my work doesnt get done. For many I even gave up trying to get help from support, because they only waste a lot of time and come up with no solution at all. In the end it takes months to complete a mix, with all kinds of workarounds and 'stunts' to get it done, since I'm working on fixing my system over 90% of the time, instead of working on the mix. And since I'm working for customers now, I simply cant do this anymore.
On the Mac Pro, okay I had to bounce a couple things, no biggie, but I get the same mix done in 2 days (large mix, over 120+ channels). So despite the Mac Pro running slower, all in all, it takes up a fraction of the time it would take on PC.
2. Thats nasty! :shock: That will be fixed in the first hot fix, in a couple of days after the release of Catalina, right? (Thats sarcasm, btw ;) )
3. I thought I was, but its a good thing you had me take another look. I read somewhere that blocksize on the Audio Device Page should be lower than on the Processing page and with the one on the Processing page not going higher then 2048, I kept it on the Device Page at 1024. But now I see there's even a 4096 on the Audio Device page, which sets the highest blocksize on the Processing page also at 4096. Not very much improvement on CPU, though. Its now a few % under and up to 'too much', instead of over.
4. I took the 12-core because that one has the higher single core speed in turbo boost. From what I was told this should outperform any PC CPU. From what I remember, PCs have been running up to 5GHz, since Devil's Canyon, like 8-9(?) years ago, so the Mac 4.4GHz should get more benefit per core, from its CPU than that.

I'm going to see if I can get a little closer to exact cause and will post when I find out more.

Thanks for your input, everyone!

Cheers!
Maarten
______________________________________________________
PC: Mac Pro 2019, 12-core, 48GB RAM
Software: OS Monterey, Studio One 6 Pro
I/O: Quantum 2626
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by PreAl on Wed May 05, 2021 5:50 am
PreAl wroteOh and another thing, try putting your plugins on separate channels and buses rather than stack em up on a single channel.if you have a lot of them.


maartenfranken1 wroteI'm not sure if I get this right. It sounds to me that you mean put one plugin on a channel, feed the output to another channel, add one plugin there, feed it through a third channel, add a plugin there, etc. That would make up to 7 or 8 channels per track, the mixer would become insanely large, but to say very confusing with like over a 1000 channels, not counting aux and bus channels.


If you put 7 or 8 high CPU usage plugins onto one channel they may all end up on a single core. Just saying... how you work around it is up to you, but I'm assuming you need to spread the load over several cores. You can easily test to see if what I'm saying is the case or not.

Intel i9 9900K (Gigabyte Z390 DESIGNARE motherboard), 32GB RAM, EVGA Geforce 1070 (Nvidia drivers).
Dell Inspiron 7591 (2 in 1) 16Gb.
Studio One Pro 6.x, Windows 11 Pro 64 bit, also running it on Mac OS Catalina via dual boot (experimental).
Presonus Quantum 2626, Presonus Studio 26c, Focusrite Saffire Pro 40, Faderport Classic (1.45), Atom SQ, Atom Pad, Maschine Studio, Octapad SPD-30, Roland A300, a number of hardware synths.
User avatar
by robertgray3 on Wed May 05, 2021 7:55 am
maartenfranken1 wroteI see that indeed the plugins use much more CPU than they did on PC (a plugin that does 5-6% on my PC does 9% on my Mac), which should not be possible.


Two quick points here- the CPU meter in Studio One does not tell you how much raw CPU power a plugin is using. It tells you how much of the available processing power on the core that plugin is on is being used. So if macOS lets Studio One access at most half of each core and your plugin is using half of a core, it will read 100%. Does that make sense?

Second- Turbo Boost does not factor into DAW performance during playback much, sorry to say, due to the nature of the processing in a DAW. It’s because Turbo Boost occurs for very brief moments and audio playback requires uninterrupted processing.

Mac OS X Catalina 10.15.7
Mac Pro 6.1
3 GHz 8-Core Intel Xeon E5
32 GB 1066 MHz DDR3
Dual AMD FirePro D500 3072 MB
Quantum 2

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