Sluggish/sloooow GUI Bitwig 2.23 macOS Sierra 10.12.6

[feedbackmachine]

What annoys me a bit is the sluggish GUI of Bitwig on 4k and the way the bitwig team ignoring such problems: It uses JAVA and lwjgl (lightweight java gaming GL lib, e.g. Minecraft) and these seem to be a common bottleneck under macOS. There are plenty reports about that. If you scroll your project and at the same time have lot of analyzer graphs displayed on the fx bar below, the gui's framerate will drop down to 5 fps. And there are a lot of people reporting that and writing about that in forums and FAQs. I also reported that, the answer was "it is your fault".

So in the end it seems to be a wrong framework decision to rely on JAVA + JAVA openGL. Also JAVA always was more sluggish on macOS than on Windows as long as I can think. Also using X11 libs isn't a good decision either, they are too cross-platform-style designed, so not utilizing specific platform speedups. X11 will run fast on Linux, assumingly, but look and feel weird on macos and Windows.

You cannot even select "run in low resolution" for the Bitwig.app, since it is some kind of custom JAVA loader.

Also you often see kind of VM inducted lags in the Bitwig GUI, e.g. if you first time click a track using a lot of graphical devices below, there is a huuuge lag, like 1 second in which the VM seems to clear up memory or garbage collect or create buffers. That is ugly, too.

There also is an easy proof that the Bitwig GUI code is to be blamed for poor gfx performance:

Let's say you use a 4K monitor (3840x2160) and choose "1920x1080, scaled" in macos display settings, the system will do the scaling, antialias etc. Bitwig here at 200% bitwig scaling will already be a bit sluggish (when having dsp gfx below). Now if you switch the OS scaling to "1600x900, scaled", and then switch the bitwig gui to 175% scaling, you will have the same resolution in Bitwig, but this time the graphics is much faster already. Because here, macos does the most of the scaling (in properly accelerated way), and Bitwig scaling calculates with 1600x900 (or 2x) only instead with 1920x1080.

Interestingly Ableton's, Studio One's, Logic Pro X' and Cubase's GUIs are running blazingly fast here, on the same machine, the same OS. Smooth 60 fps on scrolling and Zooming.

Do you think these problems are fixable at all, or is it likely we have live with it due that GUI API decision the bigwig team made?

[Enrize]

True. GUI lagging here as well on 5k display when a lot of devices with analyzers are visible.

I've learned to live with it. On the other hand i love almost lossless GUI scaling (thanks to SVG graphics). If this is the reason of this sluggishness, i can live with it.

[jarmaton]

I've reported exactly the same issues but with windows 10 and a 4k thinkpad to the bitwig support. They blamed it on the graphics card or faulty drivers but I doubt that that is the case (hovering over the volume slider of a channel also kills bitwigs performance for me).

Actually that is my problem #1 with bitwig at the moment. Guess I need to buy a decent desktop PC with a overpowered graphics card to be able to enjoy 4K and bitwig.

[Enrize]

Guess I need to buy a decent desktop PC with a overpowered graphics card to be able to enjoy 4K and bitwig.

It won't help you. GPU won't make any difference. I have EXACT same problems on my internal GPU on Mac, discrete GPU on Mac (Radeon Pro 555) and on my Windows gaming Rig with 1080ti.

Actually it would be great if GPU performance could speed GUI up.

[feedbackmachine]

No, you don't need a faster machine to have a more fluent Bitwig GUI. It is slow by design - at least I am afraid of. My machine could easily drive two 4K monitors at 60fps. There is some bottleneck either in the whole JAVA/OpenGL structure or actually in their GUI code.

That said JAVA always was slower on macOS than on Windows, so I would assume those GUI slowdowns are less drastically on Windows.

[tenchudj]

Blame APPLE!

i'm on an amd bulldozer with with a gf9600gt, 2hullhdscreens, on linux debian and i dont run into any bottlenecks gui wise.

i remember apple having dozens of performace problems with anything not gpu accelerated, like resizing pdf's or browser windows.

Theres little bitwig can do, when osx has an opengl bottleneck.
and dont get me started on that sluggish p o c named Logic.

[Enrize]

Blame APPLE!

i'm on an amd bulldozer with with a gf9600gt, 2hullhdscreens, on linux debian and i dont run into any bottlenecks gui wise.

i remember apple having dozens of performace problems with anything not gpu accelerated, like resizing pdf's or browser windows.

Theres little bitwig can do, when osx has an opengl bottleneck.
and dont get me started on that sluggish p o c named Logic.

On Windows its the same with 5k monitor. Read my post above.

Probably its better if you're not using HiDPI mode.

And latest Logic Pro X 10.3.3 GUI is flying on my Macbook Pro.

[pc999]

Well ... but Linux rules

(it really can be the best OS for a lot of things)

[cajmere]

Blame APPLE!

i'm on an amd bulldozer with with a gf9600gt, 2hullhdscreens, on linux debian and i dont run into any bottlenecks gui wise.

i remember apple having dozens of performace problems with anything not gpu accelerated, like resizing pdf's or browser windows.

Theres little bitwig can do, when osx has an opengl bottleneck.
and dont get me started on that sluggish p o c named Logic.

Wel that said. I'm also on Debian, but i've had also Gui lags in the past, so it's on every system. Now that i have a new system, i hope it doesnt return.

[tenchudj]

Wel that said. I'm also on Debian, but i've had also Gui lags in the past, so it's on every system. Now that i have a new system, i hope it doesnt return.

what were the specs?

[cajmere]

Wel that said. I'm also on Debian, but i've had also Gui lags in the past, so it's on every system. Now that i have a new system, i hope it doesnt return.

what were the specs?

It was i5 desktop 2,4ghz, 16gb ram. SSD, passive cooled graphic card. The lag don't occurred always. Minimize the analyzer devices helped. While i could use heavy softsynths, the analyzers inside the devices made it lagging.

Now with my ryzen7 i still have to see if it Will happen.
Since it also happens on systems with heavy graphic card, it seems that it's not opengl rendered.

[Enrize]

Wel that said. I'm also on Debian, but i've had also Gui lags in the past, so it's on every system. Now that i have a new system, i hope it doesnt return.

what were the specs?

It was i5 desktop 2,4ghz, 16gb ram. SSD, passive cooled graphic card. The lag don't occurred always. Minimize the analyzer devices helped. While i could use heavy softsynths, the analyzers inside the devices made it lagging.

Now with my ryzen7 i still have to see if it Will happen.
Since it also happens on systems with heavy graphic card, it seems that it's not opengl rendered.

The more importantly what was your display resolution?

[cajmere]

Wel that said. I'm also on Debian, but i've had also Gui lags in the past, so it's on every system. Now that i have a new system, i hope it doesnt return.

what were the specs?

It was i5 desktop 2,4ghz, 16gb ram. SSD, passive cooled graphic card. The lag don't occurred always. Minimize the analyzer devices helped. While i could use heavy softsynths, the analyzers inside the devices made it lagging.

Now with my ryzen7 i still have to see if it Will happen.
Since it also happens on systems with heavy graphic card, it seems that it's not opengl rendered.

The more importantly what was your display resolution?

one at 1080p, and one at 1680x1050, far far away from 5K

[Enrize]

Then i think it proves that mostly HiDPI mode is affected. Thanks!

[zezic]

Let's bump that, I have same problems with Bitwig in both Linux and Windows setups and it even affect DSP performance, causing crackles and so on.