View Single Post
Old 06-22-2019, 11:23 AM   #56
srdmusic
Human being with feelings
 
Join Date: Dec 2016
Posts: 876
Default

Quote:
Originally Posted by Justin View Post
I might be wrong but I don't think rendering of pixels is the expensive part, usually the slowness comes from getting peaks data from disk etc. (a good test would be to try disabling peaks display in the prefs and see how that helps).
Hi Justin,

Thanks again for taking to the time to listen to our requests. I wanted to give you a few of the many examples of GUI sluggishness that makes Reaper feel less powerful than it really is. I have example of sessions I can send you if you need to more help narrowing down what might be causing this sluggishness.

1) On the PC side, video playback stutters on in Reaper using VLC or FFmepg but when playing the same video on VLC player stand alone application the video plays smoothly. This happens in empty sessions with no scripts running on portable installs.

2) Reaper's GUI and video playback halts anytime a user hits the action to undo.

3) Some scripts that need high refresh rates to display visual feature make the GUI and video playback halts or becomes sluggish.

4) Marquee selecting item down a list of TCP tracks, where the screen needs to scroll down to a track that is not currently being displayed, the GUI redraw rate is extremely slow. If the user has to marquee select from track number 1 down to track number 300 for example the user will be sitting there for a very long time watching Reaper redraw the TCP track by track.

5) When the user hits save or Reaper is making a back up, the entire GUI and video playback halts. (the save thing I kind of get but backing up a file seems like that should be more of a background process that doesn't take down my session)

6) In the midi editor, I use some of Julian's midi tools like the one that draws a linear ramp of midi CC nodes. The GUI become extremely slow when the CPU is above 50%. If I'm playing the session back and trying to draw a line while it plays, the GUI refresh almost comes to a halt.

7) Some VSTi GUIs use the CPU instead of the GPU to process their interface. I can point you to specific example of a Kontakt instrument interface that takes down the entire Reaper GUI when floating it or docking it in the FX chain.

8) In larger sessions, track selection becomes very slow at the bottom of the session. Sometime more than 10 seconds to select tracks.

Most of these issues seem to be avoidable if the user had the option to run Reaper's GUI and Video playback on the GPU instead of the CPU. I understand that in a very small pool of users with slower machines that might see slightly less performance on the audio side if they processed the GUI on the video card. This is why I believe there should be a check box in the advance settings 'Allow Graphics Acceleration for Reaper GUI, scripts and Video playback'. That way users have the option. The GPU is such an untapped resource here and hope you can see in the above examples that when we are taxing our CPU then we really do need any extra power that the GPU can provide.
srdmusic is offline   Reply With Quote