You’re absolutely right. Personally I went from an Intel i9 Mac to a Mac Ultra M2 with 192 GB of Ram. Guess? I think the rendering is even worse than my old i9. In other applications? logic, Ableton etc… it’s a plane. So? Steinberg is not interested in giving benefits to Multicore owners. (crazy). Never worked in a studio with limited minutes ?
If you say so, this means you did not read carefully the messages I have written in this thread, especially the last one. I even propose an accurate test you can reproduce yourselves, that shows that WaveLab is the fastest to render among popular DAWs. Please do.
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I have never doubted the quality of WaveLab 12 pro, a product that I consider excellent without equal on the market. In my professional life I have always given importance to facts and not to words or written proclamations. The facts are indisputable, a very powerful Mac M2 Ultra does not achieve satisfactory results in terms of performance with WaveLab 12 pro. I can’t blame Apple since in all the hundreds of remaining apps it’s a rocket of speed. I just want to point out this fact which cannot be disputed by anyone.
While Apple excels in marketing, Intel has proprietary DSP algorithms that run exclusively on Intel chips (even in Rosetta mode) and significantly outperform what is currently possible on Apple Silicon chips. Additionally, Intel chips are much faster for 64-bit math processing compared to 32-bit math processing. This means that certain DSP algorithms run much faster, for example, on an i9 than on the latest Apple Silicon chip.
On the other hand, some other CPU instructions execute way faster on Apple Silicon chips than on Intel chips! Therefore, when it comes to DSP processing performance, there is no clear winner across the board. The performance depends heavily on the specific DSP process in question.
This is why I emphasize: don’t rely on graphs or performance monitors. The only true measure is a simple stopwatch when you want to compare two exactly similar processes.
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Comparing the single processor is in my opinion very limiting especially since it does not take into account the new hardware architectures of the new Apple processors, which in this field occupies an important role in all the recording studios spread throughout the world even if it does not have a monopoly, it has a important specific weight. I am sure that the future will be to program applications to take advantage of “Simultaneous and Heterogeneous Multithreading” (SHMT) as much as possible.It is impossible for me to think that the limit is in the single processor which is less powerful than an Intel one, when we are running an application on a machine that has over 15 processors that are sleeping. I am sure that this is not the best type of performance for a machine that can offer excellent performance. It is my personal point of view, I am not a programmer, but I am sure that the potential of the Mac ultra M2 can certainly be exploited more, probably in the future also the new M4 Ultra.
I never said WaveLab always uses only one core. WaveLab uses one or more cores depending on the context. Believing that using multiple cores is always faster is a misconception; it depends on various contextual factors. Only senior developers with extensive experience in multi-core programming and media streaming can fully grasp and discuss this topic. Therefore, on a forum like this, which is intended for the general public, the most practical approach is to measure performance with a stopwatch. This method is accessible to everyone and can serve as a basis for discussions.
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I know developers who have very different opinions from those expressed here. Precisely because these are mainly technical issues of computer engineering, I will not continue this pleasant exchange of opinions and points of view. I took my test and it was negatively eloquent. I’m happy with this, I can’t do anything else. Happy summer everyone… I hope one day to be able to use WaveLab 12 pro as a plugin within Logic Pro
Hi, I know this is an old thread. I was wondering if for mastering purposes it would improve processor efficiency to allow for larger buffers than 1024. Would 2048 or even 4096 allow for more heavy DSP/Processor intensive serial plug-ins at 96K? I find that when using an M3 Max with WL 12 Pro, I am always fine at 44.1K/48K, but at 96K, I will hit a processor limit sometimes. For mastering purposes, a large buffer and latency isn’t much of a problem and it would be great to be able to do more. Also, would there be any benefit to allowing the application to keep more data/plug-ins/executable code in RAM, so it can be accessed quicker? Many of us have computers with 64GB or higher RAM @PG1 Is this a correct assumption about buffer size and RAM or am I not understanding the complexity? Thanks!
To a certain and limited extent, yes.
When rendering (offline), WaveLab always uses a buffer of 4096 samples.
For real-time processing, there is a cost of using something smaller than 512 (the smaller, the more cost), but you will not gain sensible improvement if you use 1024 or 2048. This will just prevent the frequency of potential dropouts.
Thank you!