I’m not really sure where you’re at here. The first paragraph suggests you’ve seen an improvement, the second paragraph suggests you still have a problem with slow rendering.
If you find a solution in Ubuntu Studio 19.10 please post it, as it will be helpful to other people with R5 graphics who want to use Ardour.
@merlyn i tried in ubuntu 14.04 and it works a lot better, however it gets low with 6 or more heavy midi tracks, and also trying with ubuntu studio 19.10 that tell you some good news, In ubuntu studio 19.10 i was investigating the source of ardour 5.12 and it uses Cairo libs on it, by that experimenting I installed a lot of Cairo related libs in synaptic and I tell you it improved a lot, Ardour doesn’t freeze like before and I’m making a new song that for now I have various midi regions and is performing ok, how I said I experimented by my own conclusion, if still working well as it’s for now, the problem could be related of a conflict with some Cairo libs in ubuntu’s new libraries or new linux distros written source, because Ardour performs very well on Windows 7 and 10, except not loading some vst’s written with some kind of code that conflicts with Ardour, if still working well in ubuntu studio 19.10 with my experiment I will let know here.
Hello everybody! I’m notifying that for now i’m quitting Ardour linux and keep using it on windows, everybody knows the reason, there is no good compatibility with the latest linux distros and my video card, i have used up all my resources looking in forums, trying different linux distros and i can’t figure out to make my AMD A8 Prossesor with integrated graphics to make apps works as intended.
Thank you very much to all tech guys and friends that tried to give me a hand with it!
I’m a victim of sub-optimal graphics drivers causing bad performance in Ardour. The xorg.conf settings posted by @merlyn helped and I’m expanding on that post a little.
I have an AMD Ryzen 5 2500U and I am using the onboard Radeon Vega 8 graphics. The graphics driver is amdgpu (which is a different driver to radeon, which @merlyn was using according to their xorg.conf snippet). Before applying any changes to xorg.conf, a session with six tracks would use a fairly steady 55% CPU for the Ardour process and 23% for Xorg.
I found these instructions from the ArchLinux wiki useful for making a skeleton xorg.conf file. I commented everything out except one Device section for my graphics card:
Section "Device"
Option "Accel" "on"
Option "DRI3" "on"
Option "DRI" "3"
Option "ShadowPrimary" "on"
Option "TearFree" "on"
Identifier "Card0"
Driver "amdgpu"
BusID <PCI identifier for the graphics card>
EndSection
I stored this under /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d and rebooted. The problem @mobi7 encountered with the white screen hit me too. I found that using KDE as my desktop environment instead of XFCE fixed that - no idea why.
After these changes, the same Ardour session runs at 50% CPU (Ardour) and only 8% (Xorg). The crucial driver setting is ShadowPrimary. According to the manpage for amdgpu:
This option enables a so-called “shadow primary” buffer for fast CPU access to pixel data, and separate scanout buffers for each display controller (CRTC). This may improve performance for some 2D workloads, potentially at the expense of other (e.g. 3D, video) workloads.