Something like a "Draft mode" would be indeed helpful IMO.bitcrusher wrote:CPU use will be the same as 1.0, it's improved on AAX and Win64 slightly. RAM consumption was a big change. To reduce CPU consumption drastically means reducing quality. Serum aliases FAR less than most synths in their highest settings. I plan a draft mode in the future (which will still be about where other WT synths are aliasing-wise in their highest quality settings). In any case, here I get less CPU use per-voice than say Massive (by far) but Serum lends itself more to unison situations and such.
Concerning Unison e.g. DUNE 2 offers two ways, either the "normal" Unison which uses much more CPU and the Multisaw feature (with up to 32 detuned waveforms) that actually works for all waveforms and uses a lot less CPU than the Unison while sound wise the results with the Multisaw feature could be superior.
Actually a single pad with the Multisaw feature could be very low on CPU on my system (below 10% in ithe display of Live 9). Same with e.g. Waldorf Largo with full 6 voice Unison.
A funny thing concerning aliasing is that in Waldorf PPG Wave 3.V actually an emulation (!!) of the aliasing of the original PPG wave 2.2/2.3 synths was implemented that adds a certain character to the sound.
This also depends on the TruePPG mode and with this switched off there is a cleaner sound.
Even in wavetable synths that have a slight amount of aliasing i found that this usually disappears in a mix with multiple sounds playing at the same time (and usually this is mostly noticed in low and high octaves that are not used all the time...). For me it's also about practical use and in that respect an insane CPU use could be sometimes worse than a small amount of aliasing in the sound.
Based on that having a Draft mode in Serum would maybe make it more usable for people that actually care about CPU use even when the resulting sound could be slghtly worse.
I own lots of wavetable synths (and have owned even more as both hard. and software) and for me aliasing never was really a big ussue with those. With proper emulations of analog synths this could be maybe a different story but i also own several older softsynths of that type where this is not a real problem for me...
Ingo