Ardour 9.2 Meter slowdown as track count increases

Installation & Configuration Mac OS X
#1

When you’re using modern Apple Silicon hardware, like the M4, Ardour 9.x can get a bit slow with the GUI as you add more tracks, even if your CPU and GPU aren’t working too hard.

It feels great to have a session with just one or four tracks, but once you hit ten or sixteen tracks, the meter can look a bit heavy and disconnected. This happens even when you’re not using any third-party plugins. Right now, the only way to get the metering back to smooth is to hide or turn off some of the tracks.

I find this annoying as I do like ardour but I keep having issues with it but I hope this can be resolved. I tried the different canvas settings, buffer settings and let Mac OS render or whatever in the Quirks settings area and still the same, hiding tracks etc seems to be the only fix, I like snappy meters, it should be that way by default.

I submitted a bug report as well.

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#2

Well that sucks, and might be related to Apple Silicon specifically, idk… Good job on the bug report!

There are some good insights here where @paul elaborates a bit on why macOS GUI stuff has been difficult for them to pinpoint and resolve: Mac: slow GUI and high CPU on few plugins

Hopefully more is uncovered in the future about macOS’s handling of application graphics (etc.), and these problems are better/further resolved. Because yeah, on such a powerful machine, the GUI (and pretty much everything else) should feel very snappy under the vast majority of Ardour project scenarios. :man_shrugging:

-J

#3

Ya i it teachers really annoying, also why I don’t use mixbus. It just slows down. I had hopes for Ardour 9 since it has faster GUI rendering but large sessions just adding tracks seems to slow down. I’m testing just using 1080p instead of rendering internally at 4K which I do since it boosts quality on 1080P monitors. to see if it improves. I will test with 720P. (Sigh) it seems like all I do is test stuff when I use ardour/mixbus.

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#4

I also wonder how Linux compares or is this a software rending limitation which is what google AI said to me

#5

In terms of OS, the devs’ ‘priority’, generally speaking and understandably, seems to be:

  1. GNU/Linux.
  2. macOS.
    …
  3. Windows.

…
Now, being in ‘2nd place’ here is not bad. :slight_smile:
But… it’s still 2nd…

Needless to say, but if Ardour (or Mixbus) was a macOS-centric application, then of course all of this macOS-specific GUI stuff would have been thoroughly dealt-with long ago… Alas, it is not.

So, for now, the best thing you can do is post about it here and/or on the bug tracker (~both of which you’ve done :+1:), and hopefully stir some new attention from either Paul or Robin on the matter. :grimacing: :man_shrugging:

#6

This is not true. There are macOS only apps still trying to deal with some of the problems we have. Paradoxically, if we had an even more platform agnostic GUI toolkit, things would likely be a little bit better.

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#7

Thanks. I was hoping for Ardour to be GPU accelerated by Metal API on Mac OS or Vulkan or whatever. I really want ardour to shine on my Mac system. The fact that I have other more stable DAWS and I’m still looking at ardour just means that Ardour still has value and is a great program.

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#8

odd that it seems to appear that way. There is no explicit priority, and there’s also very little platform specific code in Ardour to begin with.

It’s been years since I’ve had to work on a Linux specific bug or issue, by that measure Windows unsurprisingly gets the most attention :slight_smile:

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#9

Ardour does not do any 3D drawing, nor any rendering for which modern graphic cards offer any acceleration.

On macOS Ardour’s Canvas renders directly to the graphics card memory using Metal/openGL since Ardour 5.9 which speeds up things significantly, but overall it is still rather slow compared to other OS.

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