u-he at Superbooth 23

[Borbolactic]

In the next round of u-he product updates, could you possibly increase the maximum GUI scaling options up to at least 300%, or perhaps even beyond for each of your u-he plugins, if it's not too much trouble?

I own many of your synth and effect plugins and have recently moved to a new Windows 11 device with a 4K display and unfortunately, the current 200% maximum scaling setting, isn't quite as large as I require.

An increased 'maximum scaling' setting (to at least 300%) would be very much appreciated, and would save me from further eye strain, as I'm not getting any younger!

Thank you.

It may be possible [*It is, see below.], besides temporarily changing your screen resolution, that any skins, such as, for example, the MONA skin for Diva, present a somewhat larger UI, if only by virtue of their design, if not by virtue of added choices for sizes.

Unsure, but you might want to check it out. The MONA skin seems very nice in any case, like a different synth...

*EDIT: Yes, I confirmed the larger size, at least for Diva and MONA, and the video is cued to where it is mentioned. If the cue doesn't work, it is at 1:21.

https://youtu.be/9Jw9QD7xCdM?si=LawEmixUQhBf7Rhy&t=81

[Urs]

I'm a little surprised that U-He haven't shifted to vector by now.

I have maintained my own UI framework since 2002, which is vector based, which was pretty much long before vector based solutions became widely adopted in the audio plug-in industry. It does have a concept for bitmap graphics, which we've been using extensively, but they are freely scalable in our framework - within the usual limitations that such textures have (making them too large looks blurry).

Because our UI framework was vector based form the beginning, we were among the first companies which offered resizable UIs.

In general, using bitmaps is extremely fast when rendering UIs on the CPU, and purely vector based shapes are very slow to paint. In contrast, bitmaps are slower to draw than vector based shapes when rendering on the GPU.

In my observation (mostly as an Apple user), even vector based graphics environments such as CoreGraphics (and I assume probably Windows GDI too) still spend significant rendering/preparation time on the CPU, they do not fully deploy the GPU.

Dedicated hardware accelerated solutions that would strongly promote vector-only UIs such as Vulcan or Metal pose major drawbacks and/or difficulties when accessed by plug-ins directly. Or, as with OpenGL, seem to become obsolete anyway. I don't think this is "way to go" even if other companies may be successful with that.

However, ultra high resolution displays are enforcing the use of pure vector shapes because the bitmaps graphics would simply need to take up too much memory, and memory throughput currently is the bottleneck to fast UI performance.

This is why I currently see us in a transition phase towards shape based UIs as opposed to bitmap based ones, and sooner or later we'll completely move away from bitmap graphics and texture towards vector based elements with shaders and materials.

With that said, I'm not panicking in any of these regards. We're pretty future proof with what we have, our UI framework is incredibly powerful, flexible and fast rendering as it is.

[Borbolactic]

I'm a little surprised that U-He haven't shifted to vector by now.

I have maintained my own UI framework since 2002, which is vector based, which was pretty much long before vector based solutions became widely adopted in the audio plug-in industry... [...]

Thanks for the elaboration, Urs.
Now, all you have to do, so to speak, is FLOSS your plugs to get to that ahead-of-the-curve last mile, WRT societal evolution and gift/peer-to-peer and/or similar economics.