onewave Posted January 31, 2023 Share Posted January 31, 2023 Some months ago when I was very busy working my job I decided to buy a Mac Studio Ultra from Apple. I ended up returning it within the two week window they allow for returns because when I would use lots of plugins I only got 10 of the 20 cores working with Live Input Monitoring Tracks. I am working on a song set with my drummer. We're using outboard preamps and some outboard compression as well. I was using about 12 inputs and mostly dynamics plugins with a couple effects as well. Overall it performed well, but I was hoping for better performance. If Apple claims they have made a 20 core chip why then would the CPU monitor show only 10 cores work for live tracks? Maybe they will get all 20 cores working one day, but I really never got enough time to find out why... Has anyone tried recording this many tracks with the Mac Studio in a Live performance using lots of plugins ? Would anyone know why the Mac Studio Ultra has a limit on Live tracks? I assume this is happening because The Mac Studio Ultra is such a new computer and is not optimized be used in this manner, but what do I know anyway? Thanks, Bret Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Solution des99 Posted January 31, 2023 Solution Share Posted January 31, 2023 (edited) I'm not sure what problem you're having exactly - are you saying that 10 cores were overloaded and your computer was out of processing power, and struggling, and no plugins were assigned to free cores? Or is the problem that you'd prefer to see Logic assigning plugins evenly across all cores (because that somehow seems better when looking at the performance meter), but everything was working fine? Because Logic's processing assignment isn't optimised for displaying even performance meters, it's optimised for getting work done in a performant manner. Also, Logic (like pretty much all other DAWs) only processes a complete channelstrip on one core (DAWs to this for performance reasons). If you weren't doing heavy processing (compressors and things are extremely lightweight), there's ample room for processing what you need across the cores Logic choose to distribute load over. As long as everything is getting processed, your computer is working fine, and I'm not sure what "better performance" you are expecting. If you load up a huge song project (you'll need a lot of tracks and a lot of plugins to stretch an Ultra) - are you saying that Logic still doesn't assign any plugin load to that second group of cores? You could probably load up 40 inputs, or 80 in this way, and your computer would likely be processing it all fine. So unless I'm missing something, I can't see a problem...? Edited January 31, 2023 by des99 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
onewave Posted January 31, 2023 Author Share Posted January 31, 2023 (edited) Thanks for the quick reply Des99, Yes to clarify I am more or less expressing my frustration that I was hitting the limit with processing my tracks on Input monitoring. Of course, this was a few months ago , I don't have any screenshots that I can share nor do I remember exactly how I was using my plugins. I was working on the Mac Studio Ultra, I've since returned the computer. On the one hand it's a very exciting time for realtime processing, overall the experience I had was very positive, but on the other hand if you pay for 20 cores you should be seeing them all work on input monitoring? Or does Logic only use 10 of the 20 cores of the Mac Studio Ultra? I wished I had known things would turn out this way in advance, but I'm not your average engineer and often push things too far with production, at least I did in this instance. Still it would be good to know if some users have had any similar experiences with using Logic Pro and the Mac Studio Ultra. Edited January 31, 2023 by onewave Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
des99 Posted January 31, 2023 Share Posted January 31, 2023 6 minutes ago, onewave said: Yes to clarify I am more or less expressing my frustration that I was hitting the limit with processing my tracks on Input monitoring. Ok, but you'll need to be more specific to investigate any practical situations (I get you've returned it so we can't do that now.) I think perhaps this is a misunderstanding of how plugins are processed, and you may be running into single-core limits here. (I'm speculating, as I don't know what, how many, and where the plugins you were using were in the mixer, of course.) Imagine you have an FX plugin that takes up an entire core of an M1 Mac (extreme situation, but just a hypothetical for now). "logic" would dictate that the Ultra should be able to run 20 of them, right? So, you add a track, and add that FX plugin to it. You then add a second FX plugin to the same track and... your computer overloads and stops. Eh? The system has plenty of overhead for running 20 of these, and yet it can't run 2? You're hitting the standard single-core bottleneck - one channelstrip must be processed on one core. And in our situation, you are trying to run two cores' worth of plugins on one core, which can't be done. The system can't get that amount of work done on a single core. Now, the Ultra M1 has essentially the same single-core processing performance as the M1 Max, the M1 Pro, even the base M1 - you can look up the numbers on Geekbench to confirm. So you can't run any more plugins on one channelstrip on an Ultra, than you can on an M1 Mini. You just have a lot more cores to distribute load over, so for *big* projects, you can essentially run twice the plugins that a Max could, in the most ideal situation. So, if you are using very heavy plugins (or unoptimised ones, some still perform badly on M1 despite claiming native-copatibility), you could be hitting into those single-core limits. For any more insight into what exactly was going on when you rigged this up, I'd need more actual details on just what was running. But none of this means the Ultra lacks power, or Logic can't use all the cores. You just hadn't configured a project that required any more cores, and might well have been setup poorly to hit those single-core limits (to "fix" this, you would break up single channels into multiple channels to let Logic distribute the load more freely - although there are some constraints on this in Live mode, again for performance reasons). Hope that helps... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
onewave Posted January 31, 2023 Author Share Posted January 31, 2023 5 minutes ago, des99 said: But none of this means the Ultra lacks power, or Logic can't use all the cores. You just hadn't configured a project that required any more cores, and might well have been setup poorly to hit those single-core limits (to "fix" this, you would break up single channels into multiple channels to let Logic distribute the load more freely - although there are some constraints on this in Live mode, again for performance reasons). Hope that helps... Yes, That very well could be exactly why I was "Hitting The Wall" so to speak, and not getting consistent results with my recording sessions! Maybe in the days to come I will be considering a newer "pro" computer, but for now still running my projects on a base M1 and a 2015 Macbook air, using mostly outboard gear and the moment. Back to the old "Keep It Simple Stupid" reality of live recording rather than playing somewhere in the stratosphere with plugins! Much appreciated Des99! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
des99 Posted January 31, 2023 Share Posted January 31, 2023 You're welcome! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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