Do you think the nowday's Reason is too CPU-heavy?

[Heigen5]

While my i9 is fast and stuff, I've been in the situations, whereas only one 16-poly Antidote takes my PC on the knees. This is called a 'performance bug'. When I get back home I'll test this more of, but yeah, Reason has a problem in it's performance sometimes.

Antidote is single-core so it can't benefit from all those i9 cores.

But shouldn't 3,7Ghz be enough for one Antidote patch still, as when I tested this I didn't have any other devices in the rack. And my previous PC didn't have this problem that was 4-cored i7.

[Tweak]

But shouldn't 3,7Ghz be enough for one Antidote patch still, as when I tested this I didn't have any other devices in the rack. And my previous PC didn't have this problem that was 4-cored i7.

Care to post the Antidote patch thats causing problems(apologies if this has been done elsewhere in the thread)? I have a 4 core i7 in my Mac, and I'd be interested in checking this out, as I think I've occasionally seen similar problems since Reason 12. Definitely some of my older, pre-reason 12 songs are unplayable without significant glitching (at any buffer size, or other audio setting tweaks), which seems wrong. I've also seen audio glitching happen with the CPU meter in Mac activity monitor, and the DSP meter in Reason both low (no more than a quarter of each meter in use, and no other processes using significant resources of any kind). My overall impression is that the application is less capable of delivering consistently good performance than prior to the HiDPI graphics switch.

[avasopht]

But shouldn't 3,7Ghz be enough for one Antidote patch still, as when I tested this I didn't have any other devices in the rack. And my previous PC didn't have this problem that was 4-cored i7.

Other things are involved, such as memory bandwidth.

If you don't have a dedicated GPU, a high DPI application will be accessing your RAM (and much more so than a low DPI application).

I'd be curious to see whether running at a lower resolution helps in any way, but I'd expect the GPU accelerated UI to redraw the whole screen each frame compared to the old way where it might only update what has changed.

[scotward57]

What's cool about Reason is that you don't have to resort to a lot of VST stuff to get big ass workstation layer stuff. Use Subtractor, Maelstrom or NN-19/NN-XT to layer up the more CPU hungry synths. Your computer can do that easy without breaking a sweat.

[guitfnky]

tbh, Reason 12 is a joke, as far as performance is concerned. I’ve got a newer 12-core machine with 64 GB RAM and a decent (not great GPU—1660 Super) and it shows the performance meter at about half…choking all the while as it spits out constant pops and clicks. that’s at 128 samples—in a project which 11 handled with ease. I have to crank the buffer up to 1024 samples to get it to play back without stuttering, and even then, there are a couple of spots in the project where it spikes out and glitches for no discernible reason.

and people rush to make excuses for this kind of bullshit.

[avasopht]

tbh, Reason 12 is a joke, as far as performance is concerned. I’ve got a newer 12-core machine with 64 GB RAM and a decent (not great GPU—1660 Super) and it shows the performance meter at about half…choking all the while as it spits out constant pops and clicks. that’s at 128 samples—in a project which 11 handled with ease. I have to crank the buffer up to 1024 samples to get it to play back without stuttering, and even then, there are a couple of spots in the project where it spikes out and glitches for no discernible reason.

and people rush to make excuses for this kind of bullshit.

I had no performance issues whatsoever with R12.

Just 16 GB RAM and 16 cores.

Demo songs are using 2% CPU for me.

No problem on my other laptop either with a gen5 i5, 16 GB RAM and a GeForce 940m.

There are a few annoying issues with the UI, such as its use of lazy loading implementation - making it feel sluggish when first unfolding a particular type of rack or scrolling the navigator (since it will be lazy loading each rack).

I'll probably wait until R13 though TBH. While it seems to run perfectly fine on my machine I just don't feel comfortable with the possibility of a glitch.

[guitfnky]

that’s the thing that’s most frustrating…this is a full song, nearly done, using a ton of plugins and processing, with a plenty beefy PC to handle it, AND the DSP meter doesn’t get above halfway on it. yet despite that, it’s constant glitching and crackling. the core temp monitor program shows no cores going over 30%, but somehow Reason can’t play it back without sounding like I’m running 100 tracks at 192k on an i5 with loads of processing.

[avasopht]

that’s the thing that’s most frustrating…this is a full song, nearly done, using a ton of plugins and processing, with a plenty beefy PC to handle it, AND the DSP meter doesn’t get above halfway on it. yet despite that, it’s constant glitching and crackling. the core temp monitor program shows no cores going over 30%, but somehow Reason can’t play it back without sounding like I’m running 100 tracks at 192k on an i5 with loads of processing.

Yeah ... that sounds like a scheduling/synchronisation issue (something I rattled on about several years ago).

Having a high-resolution UI with raster-based devices sure as hell doesn't help (especially if lazy loading is overused in code that could cause unpredictable pauses).

[mcatalao]

So, here's the thing...

The dsp/cpu processing thing is something that i test throughout in each new reason version, and i did a big test bench some time ago with multiple versions up to R11.
Here are my findings from that tests:
From reason 6 to 10.2 the performance is pretty much the same whether you compare projects, amount of device instances and so on. From 10.2 to 10.3 or 10.4 the performance with Re's got 10% better, reason devices got 5% better and VST's went up the roof, like 200 to 500 % better on some cases, increasing the instances you could load at 1000 sample buffer (this can depend on the buffer of your card).

From 10.4 to 11.x there is virtually no difference. To my knowledge there were no big changes on devices or audio processing and the big change in R11 was the Rack VST.

Now here's where things get interesting, from 11.x to the initial releases of 12, reason had a negative 10% difference in every project, so additional CPU and dsp load in projects about 7 to 10%. The amount of instances also decreased a bit until crackles happened. But this performance decrease was mitigated in the last 2 or 3 versions and now reason 12 is at par with reason 11.

Still, i think there could be some improvements, specially if you consider reason now outsources the graphics processing to the graphics card, so in machines that would lose a core for graphics processing, i'd expect something like say 10% or more improvement depending on the amount of cores on ones CPU (for example if you have a 4 core, maybe 15 to 25 % as you increase the cores by 1 and the audio workers by 1 or 2 depending if you have HT enabled.

TBH, I still can handle my projects in my humble I7 4790k, specially if i don't try to do EVERYTHING in a single project (sequencing, mixing and mastering), but this depends a lot on how you use reason actually. I've seen people complaining about really high dsp usage, because their projets tend to either have LOADS of per device automation, or have a lot of effects on each track, or use lots of synths (that are inherently more CPU demanding). For example if I use ReSpire, some patches are so processor hungry that they tear my CPU down and a couple of instances will eat up 20 or 30 % dsp.

But it would be nice seeing reason getting better performance both in its core devices (actually the core devices are quite performant), as in Re's or VST's. Though the VST cpu usage got really better in 10.4, i think it still can be better compared do daws like Reaper or Cubase.

[guitfnky]

yeah, Reaper is ridiculously light. I don’t think much else comes close.

[Heigen5]

I believe that hires isn't the problem here, because in the test project, there was only one Antidote, which means that only 1 gui was demanding recources, + well the core graphics too.

I think my pc and it's hardware isn't the problem causer in any way, but the cpu-handling in the core-code instead.

I'm going back home tomorrow and take a closer look into the problem then, but it's not very logical, that my 6 months old
Dell Precision 3640 MT
Intel(R) Core(TM) i9-10900K 10. Gen. 10 Cores CPU @ 3.70GHz 3.70 GHz - Turbo 5,3Ghz
Dell Inc. 0D4MD1 (U3E1) Motherboard,
Samsung SSD 2Tb Harddrive,
Seagate Expansion Portable 1 Tt External Harddrive
16Gb DDR4 Ram
Asus Monitor PA278QV (2560x1440@59Hz)
Intel UHD Graphics Card 630 (Dell)
Windows 10 Pro 64 Bit

... is to blame here.


Additional humble thoughts of mine;

Every rack should get a deticated core i.e. if you add a new synth into the second rack, it would get it's own core.
So as I have 10 cores, I could use 10 racks, that all use a different core. Just a thought.

100% sized zoom shouldn't be different from the 140% one, but just load bigger sized graphics from of the hard-drive, (should probably demand 1,5% more recourses max, compared to the default sized Reason).

Also, when midi isn't triggering anything per an instrument, then why wouldn't these instruments/effects kinda "sleep"? Just like in the modern electricity systems do too.

And everything that does processing in the realtime manner, but wouldn't have to, should not do these in the realtime then.

And lets the speculation/troubleshooting continue regarding this. Thanks to all of you thus far.

PS, If the issue really would be my graphic card, I'd get a new one, but I doupt it is the reason to my issues. I could buy a 400-500€ deticated one, (any recommendations by the way?)
And also double my 16Gb DDR4 to 32Gb.

Cheers!

[mcatalao]

(...)

Additional humble thoughts of mine;

Every rack should get a deticated core i.e. if you add a new synth into the second rack, it would get it's own core.
So as I have 10 cores, I could use 10 racks, that all use a different core. Just a thought.

100% sized zoom shouldn't be different from the 140% one, but just load bigger sized graphics from of the hard-drive, (should probably demand 1,5% more recourses max, compared to the default sized Reason).

Also, when midi isn't triggering anything per an instrument, then why wouldn't these instruments/effects kinda "sleep"? Just like in the modern electricity systems do too.

And everything that does processing in the realtime manner, but wouldn't have to, should not do these in the realtime then.

And lets the speculation/troubleshooting continue regarding this. Thanks to all of you thus far.

PS, If the issue really would be my graphic card, I'd get a new one, but I doupt it is the reason to my issues. I could buy a 400-500€ deticated one, (any recommendations by the way?)
And also double my 16Gb DDR4 to 32Gb.

Cheers!

Theoretically, the issue should not be your system as it is way more recent than mine. Still i don't have your project to try on my system.

That being said, saying a rack gets it's own core is not completely liquid, because it simply doesn't work like that. Reason (and other daws and apps) work with something called audio workers and it creates as much of those as the app has cores. Then the audio workload of the different tasks is sent to there, to whatever audio worker is available. So you really can't say a device is added to the cpu (also thread vs cpu affinity is something that's somewhat managed by the os not the app - and that's where the audio workers enter, you set 8 cores affinity to your app and and pipe stuff to be done inside). So saying this or that device is or is not multi threaded, just means that it can or not send multiple tasks for multiple audio workers at the same time. But remember, core affinity is per application tread (as the app generates as much threads as it can linked to specific cores, but that's it. There's no more magic or more management from there, to my knowledge).

Zooming in reason, is a bit different than just loading bigger assets. Yes there are assets in Re's and reason devices, but these are vector graphics, so there's a bit of calculation going on when you toggle from one zoom level to another. Reason generates cashed data to get ready faster when you stick to a zoom level, so these calculations should not happen again and again. However, graphics is not only assets but more rack, device and sequencer animations that in previous versions were in the cpu and are now on the graphics card (thus what i said, that some headroom should be expected by outsourcing graphics to the card).

About the no midi info and synth processor usage, that's something that's hard to take care in a timely fashion. Since Reason doesn't know what you're doing (you could be mixing a project, mastering, sequencing, or simply using the app live) midi devices have to always be ready even if there isn't any midi info passing through them (and lets not forget note and mod CV, players and so on). Of course you can have an intelligent decision tree to check if you should have a given device armed (is the sequencer playing, do we have midi or cv data in 1 sec away, etc, etc, etc), but to my knowledge no daw does this and the de facto implementation for instruments is, regardless of having midi data, midi devices have to be ready. That's it.

And about everything that can be processed on background, well for the most part it already is. Stuff like pitch editing, tempo changes over audio data, etc, are committed to the scratch disk and only calculated when you open the project IF needed (and that's why you shouldn't delete the scratch disk while working on a project, as reason manages that). But everything you need to be non destructive, changeable and so on, has to be real time, or it has to go to a scratch disk.

[andyhsong]

a big reason why i went all in on reason was because of their cpu efficiency. i figured their closed system (only RE's, no vst support at the time) would allow them to stay ahead of the curve when it comes to optimization, similar to how apple's ecosystem works. i also went all in on RE's. now they are branching out and becoming more mainstream which makes sense from a business point of view at least for the short term, but doing so they clearly lost some of that efficiency that made them different from the rest of the pack. they still offer enough to keep them competitive against the rest of the DAW's, but they are clearly falling behind in some categories. I hope their choice to "sell out" short term and go for that vst money pays off and they can continue to grow carve out their niche in the DAW market for the long term. reason forever

[jam-s]

I believe that hires isn't the problem here, because in the test project, there was only one Antidote, which means that only 1 gui was demanding recources, + well the core graphics too.

I think my pc and it's hardware isn't the problem causer in any way, but the cpu-handling in the core-code instead.

I'm going back home tomorrow and take a closer look into the problem then, but it's not very logical, that my 6 months old
Dell Precision 3640 MT
Intel(R) Core(TM) i9-10900K 10. Gen. 10 Cores CPU @ 3.70GHz 3.70 GHz - Turbo 5,3Ghz
Dell Inc. 0D4MD1 (U3E1) Motherboard,
Samsung SSD 2Tb Harddrive,
Seagate Expansion Portable 1 Tt External Harddrive
16Gb DDR4 Ram
Asus Monitor PA278QV (2560x1440@59Hz)
Intel UHD Graphics Card 630 (Dell)
Windows 10 Pro 64 Bit

... is to blame here.

Have you checked the power saving settings of your machine and also tried to disable hyper-threading?

[adfielding]

I've never had issues with Reason maxing out my CPU since I switched to my current PC in 2019, and I'm not exactly conservative with how I work. That said, I do think Reason typically feels less "responsive" or snappy (apologies for the incredibly vague terminology) to use than other DAWs, and I really can't put my finger on why that is.

[WOO]

I've never had issues with Reason maxing out my CPU since I switched to my current PC in 2019, and I'm not exactly conservative with how I work. That said, I do think Reason typically feels less "responsive" or snappy (apologies for the incredibly vague terminology) to use than other DAWs, and I really can't put my finger on why that is.

If I may ask. What are the specs of your 2019 pc.

[Heigen5]

Hmmm, I've tried to reproduce the Antidote 16-poly situation, whereas all my CPU would be eaten out, but everything seems being fine now.
I checked the power-saving settings and chose "best performance" for everything. Maybe it was that then?
Or maybe it was just a momentary situation for something unknown, dunno. But yeah, it's ok now.

[jam-s]

Hmmm, I've tried to reproduce the Antidote 16-poly situation, whereas all my CPU would be eaten out, but everything seems being fine now.
I checked the power-saving settings and chose "best performance" for everything. Maybe it was that then?

That's highly likely. Without setting it to high performance the core speeds are constantly being reduced which causes a lot of buffer underruns for real time audio processing due to delays when the cores have to speed up again.

[Heigen5]

Hmmm, I've tried to reproduce the Antidote 16-poly situation, whereas all my CPU would be eaten out, but everything seems being fine now.
I checked the power-saving settings and chose "best performance" for everything. Maybe it was that then?

That's highly likely. Without setting it to high performance the core speeds are constantly being reduced which causes a lot of buffer underruns for real time audio processing due to delays when the cores have to speed up again.

Might be so, thanks for pointing that out bro.

[Kategra]

I've never had issues with Reason maxing out my CPU since I switched to my current PC in 2019, and I'm not exactly conservative with how I work. That said, I do think Reason typically feels less "responsive" or snappy (apologies for the incredibly vague terminology) to use than other DAWs, and I really can't put my finger on why that is.

It's incredibly slow at times, R12 sometimes feels like it displays less than 10 frames per second..

My CPU computer is not slow: AMD 5950X 16 cores, SSDs, 32GB RAM 3600 MHz, GPU Nvidia 3080TI with 165Hz G-sync monitor. RME audio interface, ASIO drivers and I still hear some random clicks and pops now and then..

R12, on modern high end CPU, feels a lot slower then Reason 2.5 did while running on an ancient Pentium I 166 Mhz MMX.

[Jac459]

When you compare your systems you should look at the OS, antivirus on background processes also, it can play a big role.
Overall, a lot of users have very good performance and the tests of mcatalao are backing up the idea that overall perf are good
What is very likely is that something is interfering with reason (antivirus is a classic).

[adfielding]

I've never had issues with Reason maxing out my CPU since I switched to my current PC in 2019, and I'm not exactly conservative with how I work. That said, I do think Reason typically feels less "responsive" or snappy (apologies for the incredibly vague terminology) to use than other DAWs, and I really can't put my finger on why that is.

If I may ask. What are the specs of your 2019 pc.

Sorry, just realised I never responded to this! It's an i7-9700K based system with 32gb RAM. Audio interface is a Focusrite Scarlett 18i8, and it's also got a GTX 1060 in there as well - it's certainly no slouch, but it's not some kind of super high-end setup either.

R12, on modern high end CPU, feels a lot slower then Reason 2.5 did while running on an ancient Pentium I 166 Mhz MMX.

I think that's it exactly - sometimes it just feels slow, and I think a part of that comes down to the low refresh rate of on-screen elements. I think it was less noticeable before the introduction of external plug-ins, both REs and VSTs. I got so used to using Serum in Reason 9.5 that when I used it in another DAW and it ran at 60fps as opposed to the 30-or-so I'd become accustomed to I was like... wtf, this feels way nicer to use! I have no idea how much of that carries over into the operation of Reason generally, and while it certainly never impacted my ability to write music before it is one of those "huh..." things that have stuck out since venturing outside of Reason.

[WOO]

Thanks Adam. Its time for me to start saving up some money to get a better system.

[Jac459]

I got so used to using Serum in Reason 9.5 that when I used it in another DAW and it ran at 60fps as opposed to the 30-or-so I'd become accustomed to I was like... wtf, this feels way nicer to use! I have no idea how much of that carries over into the operation of Reason generally, and while it certainly never impacted my ability to write music before it is one of those "huh..." things that have stuck out since venturing outside of Reason.

I hope they will continue to update the UI, even on my laptop which has an RTX2080 the rack doesn't scroll well.
After to be honest I feel other DAWs are much more dull in UI, ableton make me feel I am still at work using Microsoft Office...

Side question on Serum: did you try it on reason 12? Is it working? How does it compare to Antidote, ReSpire or Expanse (my vaforites). I don't like VST but I could make an exception for this one...

[Popey]

I got so used to using Serum in Reason 9.5 that when I used it in another DAW and it ran at 60fps as opposed to the 30-or-so I'd become accustomed to I was like... wtf, this feels way nicer to use! I have no idea how much of that carries over into the operation of Reason generally, and while it certainly never impacted my ability to write music before it is one of those "huh..." things that have stuck out since venturing outside of Reason.

I hope they will continue to update the UI, even on my laptop which has an RTX2080 the rack doesn't scroll well.
After to be honest I feel other DAWs are much more dull in UI, ableton make me feel I am still at work using Microsoft Office...

Side question on Serum: did you try it on reason 12? Is it working? How does it compare to Antidote, ReSpire or Expanse (my vaforites). I don't like VST but I could make an exception for this one...

I know you asked adfielding to respond but just my opinion on Serum vs antidote etc is that serum workflow is quicker and modulation options/possibilities are vast. Better is subjective as the re's you mention are quality but as someone who has all of these I tend to usually use serum when creating sounds.

Although not advertised with serum you get lifetime updates and also future serum versions. The developer is on with serum 2 now so if this gets released at some point would be free too. I am not sure if you can trial serum but I am a big fan of this synth. Potential other option is the free vital synth which is similar but I prefer serum of the 2.