Laggy UI under macOS Big Sur

Hello there,

I recently switched to macOS Big Sur and discovered that ardour 6.8 (and current nightly builds aswell as latest mixbus 6.x & 7.x) perform very bad under this os. The complete UI is very laggy and slow, meters are kind of a pain to watch, plugin controls are hard to move and so on.
Are there any settings I can try to improve performance or is this “a bigger” problem, hopefully getting fixed in upcoming versions?

Thank you very much
Nic

Are you on Intel I assume?

Haven’t noticed that here honestly on M1, haven’t tested with a very recent version though.

  Seablade

I’m running Ardour 6.8.0 on Big Sur on a 2014 i5 Mac Mini with 8 gigs of RAM and am not experiencing any performance issues at all. UI is responsive, meters are working fine, plugins are working fine.

On Mixbus, we updated our packages to use a much newer Apple compiler (the one provided with 10.10). That change was made to support the latest Waves plugins which require newer macs, and also to facilitate the signing+notarization of the application for security reasons.

For that build, there is a known problem with older macs (Pre-2018) that don’t fully support Apple’s “Metal” hardware.

If your computer is affected by this “slow drawing” bug (and you didn’t have this problem before now) then you likely need to use the older build which used the Apple 10.6 compiler. A link to that older version is provided in your download email for Mixbus. Note that this build is “unsigned” so you’ll have to right-click to Open it the first time. And it won’t work with Waves v10 plugins.

You mention that this problem also affects Ardour and I don’t think that should be the case. Ardour still uses the 10.6 compiler. IIUC, YMMV, etc

Best,
-Ben at Harrison

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