Eventhough my trusty old mac pro 5.1(4.1) manages my largest projects with ease, audio wise. Even small weird things seems to slow the GUI down to a 1 fps nightmare. Repeat, none of the 12 cores seems to be over 25% load. Still, meters, zooming, moving faders etc are reminicent of an under water bike ride. Despite fast SSDs, lots of memory, upgraded GPU, the only thing that seems to help is reducing the screen resolution. Adjusting latency does not make a big difference.
There is either a inherent bottle neck somewhere in my hardware or a combination of things like plugins that slows down the GUI (without putting much load on the rest of the system…)
First question, is this the inevitable consequence of time moving forward? - Is my mac to slow at it’s (single) core?
Next and the real question, will a newer mac be substantially more agile? With newer I mean like a maxed out new mac mini or 8 core mac book pro. What can handle a project with 50-60 audio tracks, sometimes with lots of edits. 30-40 midi tracks, group channels, effect return channels 10-20 active in and out channels.
Here running at 5.1 2x6-Core Intel Xeon GUI seems to run fine since N8.5 I think. With large projects it’s a bit slower but nothing comparing old versions.
Interesting, this caught my eye because it so happens, I maintain an almost identically specc’d mac pro 5,1 as yours - including a flashed RX580 8GB GPU (a hobby project, really - have switched to Dell & win10 pro quite some years ago now). In terms of Displays, these are both UHD, I also do a lot of film production work with DaVinci Resolve Studio.
In any case, I find none of the screen update /sluggish response issues you mention (& certainly never the ‘1fps’ or slow meters etc). Nuendo certainly loads large projects more slowly, but once up it generally performs OK as one might expect. OSX Mojave runs off a PCIe NVME & while there are a couple of SSDs as RAID 0 for video, all the other disks are spinners, ie, audio, sample library etc (and which likely explains the slower load times).
MacPro 5,1, firmware 144.0.0.0.0, 48GB, 12 core 3.33ghz, Mojave 10.14.6, RX580, UA Apollo Firewire, Dell U3419W, BenQ SW2700PT. Also runs fine off a Catalina 10.15.1 boot partition.
All I can suggest for Mac OSX is to do a clean install of the system, then apps plugs etc. In my experience this about the only thing that ‘just works’ for a problematic Mac OS X install. Fresh new system & a fresh Nuendo install (no 3rd party plugs, VIs or other Mac OSX installs in the first instance. See how that goes?
Hmm, yeah I guess I should try a fresh install. But I have the same experience on my 2012 macbook pro, Nuendo 7 is snappy and fine. But on everything newer, Nuendo or Cubase, there is noticeble gui latency, delay on clicking buttons, slower meters etc.
I have always seen a gui performace punishment with lots of edits. Like multiple drum tracks edited to grid. But this is worse.
(BTW Spectralayers is like working on a web java application, Mouse pointer is really laggy)
I opened N7 on my macbook with the same size projects the other day and it was night and day. Still slower then N1.6 on my old PC but what isn’t…
I still have my SSD’s on the old slow sata connectors. I guess a nice PCI nvme like that sonnet one should speed things up…?
Here is an update. I went all in on the gamble that drive speed was the problem. I was using SSDs for system and data but they where connected through the dated SATA2 ports.
I went and bought a Sonnet M.2 4x4 PCIe card and 2 x Samsung 970 EVO Plus (one boot/applications and one for projects. I move old projects to a 8TB spinner…) Guess what, my old 5.1 feels really snappy now. Will do some testing but scrolling, zooming, moving tracks, all are really snappy and and responsive now. Stupid me who thought it was a graphics issue when it was a data access issue.
The sonnet is great. Faaaar more speed than necessary and 4 slots for NVMe:s. Only problem is that the card blocks cooling for the rx580. But so far no problem since the RX580 is running at crawl speed.
I’m on a 6-core with an RX560 and (2) Samsung 850s for OS/Project drives in the SATA 2 bays. GUI is fine on N10 with large projects/moderate automation/Kontakt VSTi.
I’d hazard a guess your problem was OS or a perhaps a drive-specific issue that got fixed when you loaded up your new drives. Nevertheless, you’re not wanting for drive speed now!
I’ve heard it said that upgrading ones graphics card can bring some appreciable performance improvements. I’m also on a 5.1 Mac (6 core) and might try it. Maybe something to consider particularly if your concerns point toward GUI related issues.
