Reason & FL Studio - cross platform performance benchmark
Posted: 18 Jan 2018
Hey, this is my first post here
I'm SH-1, and I'm a FLeb mainly- I've been producing in FL for roundabout 11 years now. I've always liked tinkering with friend's and clients' copies of Reason though, and when VST support was added I really had no reason not to buy one for myself. I started a few tracks and the thing that irked me the most was... compared to FL Studio, I VERY quickly ran into the brick wall of 100% CPU usage on all cores. I mostly chalk that up to VST handling in Reason, since from personal experience there has been a bit more headroom when I used the native and RE formats exclusively.
So I got together with a Reason power user who had made a benchmark file using a lot of VSTs that we both have in Reason and I painstakingly transferred every single detail into FL Studio (it's harder than you might think), double and triple checked against the Reason file to make sure the MIDI interpolation didn't screw up the automation in FL and tried to match the colours from the Reason session
There is a single block version and a version with 6 copies of everything that stack up incrementally. Smart disable has been left OFF for the FL projects to ensure a fair comparison.
Here are the single block results:
Reason document in idle:
FL Project in idle:
Reason Document playing:
FL Project playing:
Now, on to the 6-layers project:
Reason document in idle:
FL Project in idle:
Reason Document playing (CPU usage max set to 95%):
FL Project playing:
As you can see, I have measured quite a substantial difference in VST based performance for both DAWs. The synths used are the same, the routing is the same, the automation is the same and the effects used are the same. Noteworthy: Reason idles at a higher CPU usage than FL when it's playing the project.
All tests were conducted on the following system:
CPU: i7 8700K OC at 5 GHZ
RAM: 32 GB Crucial Ballistix Sport 2400 in Dual Channel
ASUS Prime Z370 Series Motherboard
Presonus Audiobox iTwo
Driver used was FL ASIO at 512 smp latency, triple buffer OFF in FL
In the few months that I've been using Reason and especially working with this benchmark (a lot of opening FL, closing Reason and vice versa) I've also noticed some other quirks that bog down my experience with the program- namely the mandatory VST scanning BEFORE it even opens up- I have thousands of plugins, many of them from 32-bit days that are being scanned and disregarded every time I open Reason. It sometimes takes over 5 minutes for me. My suggestion would be to have an option in the plugin manager to only trigger scans manually- Anyone who's installed a plugin knows there is a plugin Reason doesn't know about, and it should be no problem to go to the manage plugins window and hit scan. I'm sure I'm not the only one who would welcome that workflow change.
The GUI of many VST plugins seems to run at a lower frame rate than reason- The GUI will lag, but the change in sound is smooth, so I'm guessing it's mainly a graphical thing...
If you own both FL and Reason and want to seethe difference in performance for yourself, I'm going to provide links to both sessions here. Be advised I work closely with Image Line, and therefore the version I made the benchmark with has some alpha code in there and therefore doesn't open with 12.5.1 build 165. It's old alpha code though, so it will open with the latest beta version of FL.
Single Benchmark FL:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/jazkkpyowopv3 ... e.flp?dl=0
Single Benchmark Reason:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/t2xvuxieglb48 ... eason?dl=0
Multi Benchmark FL:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/2is38lk5stt2v ... i.flp?dl=0
Multi Benchmark Reason:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/tthp4oyjtcvk4 ... eason?dl=0
I'm SH-1, and I'm a FLeb mainly- I've been producing in FL for roundabout 11 years now. I've always liked tinkering with friend's and clients' copies of Reason though, and when VST support was added I really had no reason not to buy one for myself. I started a few tracks and the thing that irked me the most was... compared to FL Studio, I VERY quickly ran into the brick wall of 100% CPU usage on all cores. I mostly chalk that up to VST handling in Reason, since from personal experience there has been a bit more headroom when I used the native and RE formats exclusively.
So I got together with a Reason power user who had made a benchmark file using a lot of VSTs that we both have in Reason and I painstakingly transferred every single detail into FL Studio (it's harder than you might think), double and triple checked against the Reason file to make sure the MIDI interpolation didn't screw up the automation in FL and tried to match the colours from the Reason session
There is a single block version and a version with 6 copies of everything that stack up incrementally. Smart disable has been left OFF for the FL projects to ensure a fair comparison.
Here are the single block results:
Reason document in idle:
FL Project in idle:
Reason Document playing:
FL Project playing:
Now, on to the 6-layers project:
Reason document in idle:
FL Project in idle:
Reason Document playing (CPU usage max set to 95%):
FL Project playing:
As you can see, I have measured quite a substantial difference in VST based performance for both DAWs. The synths used are the same, the routing is the same, the automation is the same and the effects used are the same. Noteworthy: Reason idles at a higher CPU usage than FL when it's playing the project.
All tests were conducted on the following system:
CPU: i7 8700K OC at 5 GHZ
RAM: 32 GB Crucial Ballistix Sport 2400 in Dual Channel
ASUS Prime Z370 Series Motherboard
Presonus Audiobox iTwo
Driver used was FL ASIO at 512 smp latency, triple buffer OFF in FL
In the few months that I've been using Reason and especially working with this benchmark (a lot of opening FL, closing Reason and vice versa) I've also noticed some other quirks that bog down my experience with the program- namely the mandatory VST scanning BEFORE it even opens up- I have thousands of plugins, many of them from 32-bit days that are being scanned and disregarded every time I open Reason. It sometimes takes over 5 minutes for me. My suggestion would be to have an option in the plugin manager to only trigger scans manually- Anyone who's installed a plugin knows there is a plugin Reason doesn't know about, and it should be no problem to go to the manage plugins window and hit scan. I'm sure I'm not the only one who would welcome that workflow change.
The GUI of many VST plugins seems to run at a lower frame rate than reason- The GUI will lag, but the change in sound is smooth, so I'm guessing it's mainly a graphical thing...
If you own both FL and Reason and want to seethe difference in performance for yourself, I'm going to provide links to both sessions here. Be advised I work closely with Image Line, and therefore the version I made the benchmark with has some alpha code in there and therefore doesn't open with 12.5.1 build 165. It's old alpha code though, so it will open with the latest beta version of FL.
Single Benchmark FL:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/jazkkpyowopv3 ... e.flp?dl=0
Single Benchmark Reason:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/t2xvuxieglb48 ... eason?dl=0
Multi Benchmark FL:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/2is38lk5stt2v ... i.flp?dl=0
Multi Benchmark Reason:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/tthp4oyjtcvk4 ... eason?dl=0