Before reading: I always keep the opening post up to date, so people new to this thread (or devs) don't have to read through all the comments.
Short time ago I moved from Cubase to Reaper. Now that I have set up everything as I needed it I have some serious lag problems when dealing with bigger projects.
My track template is about 100 tracks, my main Monitor is a 4k 32" and my second monitor is a 1680x1050 one. I experience lags especially when hand scrolling/vertical scrolling around a bunch of split up items on the 4k monitor, not on the smaller one. In my example I have 2 drum performances of ~3 minutes each, which are dynamically split up at their snare and kick hits. A normal scenario when editing recorded drums.
Before I used a GT1030 which is bare minimum for a 4k monitor and I thought that is the issue, then I ordered a RX590 which should be much more powerful, but still lags, even if it is a little bit better. Overall the smaller screen feels snappier in Reaper, even with no items visible. Windows itself is as snappy as it can get. For comparison: In Cubase it lags a lot less when dealing with similar numbers of tracks and items.
Now everybody says that Reaper doesn't use the GPU, but I can see how 3D usage goes up when scrolling in Reaper. It also depends on the zoom level in the arrangement view. I noticed, that on the 4k screen the 3D GPU usage is always ~double than on the smaller 1680x1050 screen. When zoomed out to max the GPU usage goes up to 70% on the 4k screen and 35% on the smaller one. When zoomed in that all items of the drum performances are visible, the GPU usage drops to 20-30% for each screen, only that it lags on the 4k and is snappy on the smaller screen.
Videos which show the issue:
Video 1a shows you how it lags on the 4k screen when scrolling around the split up drum performances, but not on some single drawn midi items.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WlFbYtAa8qs
Video 1b shows you how the GPU 3D usage goes up when zoomed out to max and scrolling. It is around 60%-70% and feels also fast.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNZdLw0HTkU
Video 2a shows that on the 1680x1050 screen it is always fluid and reacts quickly.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-0q7G8MEbs
Video 2b shows you how the GPU 3D usage goes up when zoomed out to max and scrolling. It is around 30%-35% and feels also fast.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sr0LII_Kr3Y
Video 3 shows you how it lags in the midi editor when moving notes during playback on the 4k monitor.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_PNTv2Vx_o
Video 4 shows no lag in the midi editor when moving notes during playback on the 1680x1050 monitor.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hrTnz6VtkJk
What I have tried + additional info:
- There is no real big difference from using a Geforce GT1030 with 2GB RAM and a (way faster) AMD RX 590 with 8GB RAM
- Scrolling horizontally is not that bad as scrolling vertically or hand scrolling
- It gets a bit worse sometimes if there is a time selection visible
- I installed Reaper 6.02 freshly
- It behaves exactly the same even with all toolbars disabled
- On one page there are around 80 tracks visible
- does not matter which theme is loaded
- no plugins are loaded
- installed the newest drivers on each graphic card when testing
- tried various display settings like 8bit or 10 bit colors
- free sync on-off, game mode on display on/off (was even worse when it was on)
- different display cables (hdmi 2.0/displayport 1.2)
- installed older drivers or just the standard drivers from windows update
- disabling/enabling integrated graphics
- Cleaned up all remaining GPU/audio drivers with the DDU removal tool and reinstalled drivers
- newest windows update (installed 1909)
- booted to win safe mode to test it
- tried various appearance prefs and UI tweaks in Reaper but no luck (multimon aware/aware/etc)
- scanned my system for virusses/malware/mining with Norton PE/Roguekiller/etc.
- tried various audio buffer settings from lowest to highest
- windows/browsing/office/videos run as smooth as they can be on this PC
- pref hi-resolution peaks is set to off
- tested it positive on multiple systems (read below)
How to reproduce:
I uploaded a project, so others can try to reproduce my issue on a hi-res screen (4k). Would help a lot if others could confirm the issue:
https://mega.nz/#F!cQIRDILA!V4_lE__sNNkzNSKr7xFJmg
1) Open the project and load the Reaper 5 default theme on a 4k screen
2) adjust the zoom level so the items fill the screen horizontally like this
3) marquee select and time select the items and hand/vertical scroll around them
4) then try to zoom in vertically to fill the screen with the items, and repeat Nr. 3). Any change?
5) optionally: try the same on a 1080 screen. In my case its night and day difference
6) You can try to lower the minimum track height in the rtconfig.ini file, this makes it even worse
PS: I sliced the audio up in a lot of pieces to simulate a quantized drum performance and/or a project with a lot of stuff going on. Doesn't matter if plugins are missing, since it happens also without them.
Thank you very much!
I also could reproduce this issue all the time on other systems:
I was able to reproduce this issue on 2 systems which are completely different from mine, to report my findings here. And in both cases I was able to get about the same behaviour on 4k (I downloaded and installed Reaper directly from the homepage and then opened the project I attached in this thread):
AMD Ryzen 7 2700X 8X 3,7Ghz - 32gb RAM - 500gb SSD M2 - GTX 1080 ti - Windows 1803 installed on June 2019
AMD FX8300 8x 3,3 GHz - 8gb RAM - 256 SSD - GT 1030 - Windows 1909 freshly installed
So now I am pretty sure that this must be an issue for everyone with higher resolutions.