Yes. Any uad plugin in the project slows down the rendering speed significantly.
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UAD is connected to PCIe bus, and the bus speed does not change even if you have a faster CPU. This is not just for UAD but for all the plugin that uses DSP.
In real-time export, the calculation for a buffer does not start until the buffer is filled and this timing is governed by the wordclock. In offline export, the wordclock is ignored and it calculates the next buffer as soon as the current one is finished, so it speeds up significantly.
But you still have to send data to pcie then receive it back, this speed is the same regardless of online/offline or CPU speed which is relatively slow in modern PC. Even you have a CPU run at 4x speed with 4x more cores, the time it takes wonāt be shorter.
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Like Takashi wrote thereās first of all the issue of the connection being a bottleneck.
But in addition to that the UAD-2 Shark DSP chips offer an advantage thatās similar to Avidās/Digidesignās DSP chips - they offer a guaranteed minimum amount of processing no matter what you do. This was a huge benefit in the past because as long as your computer was compatible it could actually be fairly weak and those DSP cards would still give you what Avid/Digi/UA said theyād give.
But it was all based on realtime processing. I think a better way to think about it is to focus on your CPU and native processing. If you are able to run the export mixdown faster than realtime by a factor of say 5x then it really has to mean that when you do the export thereās 5x worth of processing headroom in the CPU. But imagine if you could truly max that out - would you still have 5x the export speed? Iām not so sure thatās the case. And so in order for the UAD-2 DSP to somehow process faster it would need to not be maxed out, there would need to be some headroom to use to process faster, and that in turn would mean that when youāre playing back in realtime itās headroom thatās not being used for their plugins.
So to me itās just a matter of where the capacity is allocated. I donāt think that DSP solution was ever meant to give you faster export or anything like that, it was meant to a) run specific high quality plugins with b) a guaranteed amount of plugins per DSP chip. And it offers exactly that.
Itās a drag maybe, but on the other hand some of the plugins are absolutely astoundingly good sounding.
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That is not true-- changing the interfaceās buffer to a higher level decreases rendering time significantly. There are many threads acknowledging this, but better yet, practical experience demonstrates it very well.
Chewy
Thatās exactly what Iāve done when mastering audiobooks. Those projects can run in realtime in excess of 15 hours, and itās a pain in the butt to sit around waiting for them to render with UAD stuff. So I use only Cubendoās built-in effects for those. And Nuendo has some very useful built-in plugins, which are more than adequate to get the sound to spec.
On top of that, since I work remotely a lot of the time, on various computers, not all equipped with PCIe (my laptop ha a UAD-1 solo card which can handle a couple of plugs at a timeā¦but why botherā¦), itās just easier to have all of the built-in FX available without thinking about it.
I still rely on UAD plugins for music production and TV/movie composing-- applications that tend not to be more than a few minutes as a rule.
If itās a matter of sprucing up an audiobook narration with one of UADās great preamps (there isnāt anything native in Nuendo that really has Neve or Avalon āmagicā), Iāll pre-process overnight so theyāre not part of the final mastering chain. But that doesnāt happen very often. I wouldnāt consider chucking my UADsā¦ and am still a sucker for a holiday + coupon sale. Iām just more choosy about how how they fit into the production triangle: āCheap, Fast, Good: pick two.ā That and pre-processing (when practical) work pretty well over here.
Chewy
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