Acoustica Heavy on CPU Mac OD High Sierra

[DrQuest]

I've had to stop using Acoustica because it is so CPU heavy. Just playing and audio file 48k it is using over 100% of my CPU so there are clicks and pops when playing. Why is this app so heavy. No plugins running. I have the analyzer windows closed and it's always the same.
Mac OS 10.13.6
iMac 3.2 Ghz processor i5
Does this only run on M1 Macs now? I like the app but it seems to have got worse on each update.

[Gevatter]

No problems on Mac mini M1!

[stian]

I've had to stop using Acoustica because it is so CPU heavy. Just playing and audio file 48k it is using over 100% of my CPU so there are clicks and pops when playing. Why is this app so heavy. No plugins running. I have the analyzer windows closed and it's always the same.
Mac OS 10.13.6
iMac 3.2 Ghz processor i5
Does this only run on M1 Macs now? I like the app but it seems to have got worse on each update.

We are not aware of any issues that would slow down Acoustica to that degree. Also, the native M1 support shouldn't affect the performance on Intel as Acoustica is distributed as a universal binary with native code for the two processors. What buffer size did you set in the audio device settings (Edit > Preferences > Audio Device Settings)? Also, does resizing the Acoustica main window affect the performance. If it does, it would indicate that the graphics is the bottleneck.

Best,
Stian

[pedrover]

My experience of Acoustica on my iMac was very similar to the OP. Fans began whirring loudly, Screen responses slowed right down and stuttered etc. I gave up my trial of Acoustica after just a couple of hours. It was too painful to use the app.
Here's my system spec.

iMac retina 27 inch - late 2015
processor : 3.3 Ghz Core i5
Memory: 24Gb 1867Mhz DDR3
Graphics: AMD Radeon R9 M395 2GB
At the time of testing I was also using Hi Sierra I think. Now I have moved onto Mojave.

I was able to try the individual restoration plugins from the suite within Adobe Audition and they worked fine. I was just not able to run Acoustica as an app.
My Test was in Dec 2021, so it could be a more recent build has solved these system/CPU/GPU issues. Anyone have experience with a iMac of similar spec to mine where Acoustica is working smoothly and fans are not blowing like a hurricane?

[stian]

Thanks for reporting the issue! I've done some further experiments and I discovered that the graphics in Acoustica is sluggish with certain scaling factors on Mac. Could you please check the Display settings (click Apple Symbol > System Preferences... > Displays). I have a Mac Mini 2018 with a 32" UHD display and MacOS shows five different scaling options from "Larger Text" to "More Space". Apparently, bitmap scaling is very slow for non-integer factors and there's a performance warning indicated below the scaling icon for the three in between ("Using a scaled resolution may affect performance"). Could you please check if any of the options in between are selected? If yes, does choosing either the maximum (2x) or no scaling improve the situation? Thanks in advance!

Best,
Stian

[iiAARD]

I would like to point out that all your plugins on M1 are glitchy, they do not load as fast as native ones and when just opened doing nothing - they eat up GPU for no reason.

[stian]

I would like to point out that all your plugins on M1 are glitchy, they do not load as fast as native ones and when just opened doing nothing - they eat up GPU for no reason.

Thanks for reporting. I don't think this is related to M1 (the latest plug-in versions run natively on Apple Silicon btw.), but there's a known issue with the OpenGL rendering in JUCE (the cross-platform library we use for development) and Monterey. Only some users are affected, but we have switched to CoreGraphics rendering in the current Acoustica 7.4 beta version, and it seems to solve the issues. We'll update the plug-ins as soon as possible after the release of Acoustica 7.4.

Best,
Stian