Vital does run smooth and looks good, but my Macbook Pro starts to heat up close to 90C and the fans are going almost full blast.
It’d be nice if there was an option to limit max framerate or disable fancy graphics.
Wow, I haven’t seen that with MBPs of recent vintage. Is yours pretty old?
Late 2013. Works great with the exception of 3D games.
I know Macs have a much longer usable lifespan than windows machines. Thats one of the reasons I love them. But that is 9 years old, and the clock speed on the processor is just barely fast enough for music production (Ableton’s minimum clock speed is 2GHz). It doesn’t surprise me that Vital pushes it hard. Have you used other comparable soft synths (like Serum or Surge)?
You could try reducing the oversampling in Vital - maybe that would help a bit?
It’s 2.4 Ghz (Turbo boost up to 2.9Ghz). I use all the latest music software with no issues. Except, if a plugin has nice hardware accelerated graphic animations (using the Metal API I guess) and framerate isn’t capped, the fan can get loud. CPU usage rarely goes over 10% in Ableton unless I have a big chain of FX (like 10+).
My gaming PC has a similar issue, where if I play a game without a capped framerate and no V-Sync, the fps will reach 300fps and the graphics card fan spins up. So you cap the framerate.
Yeah, 2.4 gigahertz is much better. Maybe it is graphics related. Is it better when the Vital window is closed? (Vital still playing on the track, but UI closed)
Yeah, it’s better when I close Vital’s GUI. I’m convinced it’s graphic animations related. I think, wherever the Intel Integrated Graphics chip is located on this laptop, it gets way less airflow than the CPU. Even back around 2014, I’d try play a simple game like Don’t Starve and the fans got loud. The game played smooth, but these thin laptops have terrible airflow.
Maybe worth trying the 1.5.1 beta?
I think the graphics engine in 1.5.1 is all-new, so it may well have better performance characteristics on an older machine.