Try running Vital and your DAW through the Built-in graphics (not AMD, for instance). This gave me instant -10% Less CPU load. Tbh, Pigments 3 is much CPU hungrier than Vital.
Vital will always be OK with no optimization on these top-end machines, the need for optimization, for me, is more to improve matters for the average laptop.
So true!
Not really on my System with AMD radeon. Upon loading Studio One with Vital, the CPU in the task bar gave instantly 23% Load. When I made S1 and Vital to use Intel graphics instead, the CPU went down to 12-15%.
There isnāt a synth that is fully optimized. A majority of the big names like Serum, Sylenth1, and Vital come close. In my experience as a plugin developer, there are two major factors that impact a synthās optimization - Architecture and Algorithm
Architecture is the main idea of where a synth put the audio through what thing and how it does it. You could process each oscillator voice in scalar form (I.E normal integers and floating point numbers) or vector form (Special CPU instructions to make things faster in parallels). It has been common to process voices in vectors because you can synthesize stuff and do filters in not a lot of CPU instructions. Vital has an entire section of its source code to vector intrinsics. I can guarantee that Vital would kill your CPU if vector intrinsics werenāt used.
Algorithm is the main idea of how to do something in an architecture. Vitalās unison algorithm is very CPU friendly compared to Serumās. The effects are very sturdy and donāt add as much CPU as the ones in Serum.
One thing that Iāve screwed up on in the past is filters- they are the main element of subtractive synthesis. They are also processed voice by voice, meaning every note will have its own filter. This is ok with a few notes, but you need to make sure that your filters are optimized for high polyphony. Vitalās filters are pretty good, and I see no needed CPU optimizations. There are other synths with faster filters, so they may be part of the high CPU thing.
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I wonder if the gpu could be used for this instead of the cpuā¦ Pushing vectors through shaders, do the math and back out againā¦ But would probably have to dial back the visual effects a bitā¦ Also not sure on latency of putting data on the gpu and getting it back again.
The only thing that surprised me really was that it consumed 30 to 40% of an RTX 3080, when in view, so maybe some optimisation on the graphical routines down the road. Serum doesnāt touch my GPU as far as I can tell.
Iāve seen many VST and standalone synths/fxs that uses the GPU to process DSP, now a days latency isnāt that much you can nearly achieve around 3ms with GPU audio processing, the problem is, parallelizing a audio stuff is basically the DarkSouls level of coding to programmers, simply put a single core in GPU is 50 times weaker than your CPU single core performance, and you want to utilize those 10,496 cores (RTX 3090 i.e.)
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Seems like the GUI CPU loading issue I was having is a purely system related thing (4 years old machine) . My machine behaves exactly the same way with the Pigments 3. So, I guess, nothing can be done and itās NOT a Vital bug or something.
Just tested on an M1 Mac Mini using REAPER v6.29 for ARM64 (M1).
While REAPER is written for M1 Macs now, Vital isnāt, so itās running in a Rosetta 2 x86 wrapper. I tried finding a somewhat complex preset to use, and settled on āCinema Bellsā. I set up a 3-note major chord to loop and here is the usage, via REAPERās performance meter while it was playing and while Vitalās window was open. No effects and no other tracks in the project:
Then, for laughs, I duplicated the same track 6 times, and this is what I got while it was playing:
https://i.imgur.com/sokbJPB.png
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One way to decrease CPU consumption would be to have separate oversampling settings for realtime and offline (rendering / export), so that you could run CPU with no oversampling while playing and recording and still make sure that it will be bounced at a higher oversampling rare during export. If you would like to see this feature implemented, please like or reply to this post
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Hello, I want to Iike vital, great features, great interfaceā¦ unusable lag.
I have a fairly new MacBook -
I launch ableton with 6 vital tracks - 7% cpu usage.
I open the vital window to edit or scroll the library and the cpu usage skyrockets at 30 40%
Closing the window does nothing to restore the cpu if not dropping a 5 %
Interface of the whole os becomes sluggish - using sidecar becomes a nightmare
(p.s. you can make ableton fully pausa le on iPad if you create a custom onscreen keyboard for the shortcuts in OS X keyboard viewer, it takes minutes and itās amazing).
Vital interface is the cpu and gpu killer.
I want to use vitalā¦ and subscribeā¦ but I can barely use itā¦
Any rapid fix?
Matt has been working on a major rewrite of Vital that in part will address GUI issues but there is no word on a release date yet.
So other than trying to adjust settings on your system there is no ārapid fixā at this time.
Perhaps other Mac users can chime in with some advice to optimize your system to run Vital more efficiently.
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thanks teksonik.
I see that autocorrect changed some text in my previous message making part of its meaning lost, what I wanted to say in the brackets is that ableton can be used in touch mode (pen mode) on ipad without sacrificing any shortcut using a custom on screen keyboard layout. It is an off topic, but it might be useful to someone in the forum.
I hope the gui rendering cost in resources will be fixed soon, if anyone has any advice, please feel free to shareā¦ I tried boosting resources from terminal with the nice command, but I get permission issues.
Interesting. Since Matt is working on updating the GUI engine, then this may get addressed with the next release.
Can I add my 2 cents?
I have a 11th generation core i5, and even when my cpu usage (taskbar or Reaper performance meter) is under 10%, I have severe sound freezes or dropouts (Iām not english, I donāt know the exact word, but itās like Iād want to have zero latency on my sound card, and it obiously canāt) on some presets (usually big pads).
Even with oversampling set to 1, it happens sometimes.
My laptop is under LinuxMint with Reaper.
Are you sure Vital uses the 8 cpu cores?
I think Vital is quite mild on the CPU and Iām running an old 2012 Mac Pro. Waves Element 2ā¦ now thereās a CPU hog! But of course YMMV
I suggest buying the pro version and download the 1.5 beta pre-release: everything is solved. Thanks!
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i agree. The 1.5x beta runs great
Forget CPU optimisation, itās looking like GPU AUDIO will be the next innovation.
1 ms latency.