It’s not a thing that we’ve spent lot of effort trying to optimize. The comparison with Logic in particular is less interesting to us, because we know that Apple plays some internal games, using OS APIs that are not documented. But we also know that other DAWs sometimes do better than Ardour.
It’s as optimized as its going to be for a while. If that doesn’t work for you, the good news is: you still have Logic!
We’ve also found that the measurement of “DSP load” itself varies across different DAWs. Ardour is more or less the only one where you can go and read precisely what we measure. A few years we did some detailed investigation comparing Reaper and Ardour, and even though the displayed numbers were different, the actual DSP load was essentially identical in both.
Finally, another trick that quite a few DAWs have started to use is to differentiate between “live” tracks and non-live ones. The non-live ones use much bigger buffer sizes than the live ones, which means that response to knob twiddling etc. is a bit more latent. While we understand that this does provide the experience of lower DSP load, it’s not an engineering road we want to go down.
Thanks for the explanation. I appreciate it. I’m sure that Ardour can process any number of MIDI inst. tracks but my gripe is with the GUI getting so ‘low framerate’. My Mac Studio can handle the workload of course but from a display point of view it’s less than optimal.
I’ve since reinstated '‘Use visibility information provided by your Window Manager/Desktop’ as bits of windows were disappearing until I mouse-hovered on the elements that were missing.
What macOS version do you run? Is this a mac-mini with external display, or a macbook with Retina display? Intel or Apple Silicon?
tech-details:
Recent versions of macOS always ask Applications to redraw the complete GUI, even if nothing has changed. This slows things down.
When turning off “*Use visibility information provided by …”, Arodur keeps track of areas to be redrawn. However in some cases (mostly with external displays) that can lead to parts of the GUI disappearing (until you mouse-over). For unknown reasons parts of the GUI that didn’t change need to be redrawn anyway.
Sadly, it is unlikely that the actual release of v9 will behave any differently. We have only seen this problem on specific (recent) versions of macOS when used with multiple monitors. Needless to say, that makes figuring out the cause rather challenging …
Bugger. That’s disappointing. I really love how Ardour works and seems more configurable and professional than Logic. It’s a pity that certain configs of Mac s/w & h/w hold back the development of a fine DAW on tha platform. I use an ultra-wide 32:9 and 21:9 monitors. Maybe they’re the culprit in some way.
