Wavelab 11 plugin performance on Macs

Maybe time for a new topic for WL 11 plugin performance on Macs. To me the plugin performance on WL 11 on my Mac looks promising compared to WL 10. Also the GUI performance seems to have improved. However, this view is only based on Softube Tape plugin where WL 10 struggled with the rolling reels - they were far from steady and appeared as in slow motion. In WL 11 the reels roll steadily.

WL 11 audio processing load - single audio file
The initial problem I had with WL 11 seem to be related to a master section preset I tried using from WL 10. I setup the same plugins anew in WL 11 master sections (apart from one plugin: Nugen Monofilter 4 - which causes an immediate crash of WL 11 pro when you load it in the master section but works in WL 10). The audio processing load meter shows very modest level of strain on the system.

WL 10 audio processing load - single audio file
Wavelab 10 load is not sky high either with the same audio file and same master section plugins.

WL 10 audio processing load - audio montage
However, if I have the montage open I’ve been working on lately open in WL 10 (without any clip, track or output plugins - I had to remove these because after the Big Sur 11.5.2 update something happened and the montage was suddenly unworkable with clip plugins I had used prior to the update) - the load goes up quite a bit.

WL 11 audio processing load - audio montage
WL 11 processing load on a montage which has Quadrafuzz on a few clips.

Several notes:
The green bar does not show the consumption of all cores ( something that can never be too faithfully).
It shows only the consumption of the most used core. That is the core that could cause a dropout.

Secondly, performance is increased when plugins/tracks happen to play at the same time.
But when plugins are in series, parallel processing can’t happen.

[quote=“PG1, post:2, topic:739575”]
The green bar does not show the consumption of all cores ( something that can never be too faithfully).
It shows only the consumption of the most used core. That is the core that could cause a dropout.[/quote]

Ok, good to know. It appears that the performance is a bit better on WL 11 in any case.

[quote=“PG1, post:2, topic:739575”]
Secondly, performance is increased when plugins/tracks happen to play at the same time.
But when plugins are in series, parallel processing can’t happen.
[/quote ]

So, WL 11 is making use of several cores only when several clips play at the same time and the clips have individual processing applied to them.

yes, clips being on lanes or tracks.

So, is there a way to make use of parallel processing if the end result is a two track stereo album master, i.e. can the lanes/tracks be output as separate files if they all play back at the same time?

If you speak about rendering files, you speak about rendering then, not playback.
This is a good question. But currently files rendered from the same montage, are not rendered in parallel, there are queued. But such a feature could appear in the future.

And what about Clip/Track/Output slots? Are they processed in parallel? Maybe worth to try to separate plugins with these chains.

I have significant performance troubles in WL11. Even playing audio montage without any plugins causes dropouts with different buffer sizes – even extremely large ones.

As far as I can see one bit of the problem is with the GUI. I tried to connect external display (non-retina, non-hi-dpi) and cpu load reduces a little.

If I insert just a single instance of Ozone, the setup becomes unusable. I didn’t have this problem a year ago – don’t know if it is related to WaveLab or macOS update.

WaveLab Elements 11.1.10.39 on MacBook Pro 13 2015 running macOS 12.4 Monterey

Everything that can be processed in parallel is processed in parallel. An easy example is plugins on two tracks, as tracks are parallel by nature.

I think I understood the point.

Yet I can’t understand what stops us processing slots (or chains) in sequence but on multiple cores. For example clip inserts on one CPU core, tracks inserts on other or even different VSTs on multiple cores. It may be related somehow to sharing memory between threads but I think it’s possible to resolve it some way.