I don’t know, but maybe it doesn’t matter? How does it work when it’s “doing something”?
Maybe I’m freaking out over nothing, I’m also not very experienced with VCV and so don’t know what is considered normal performance. On most patches my computer heats up enough to make me a little nervous lol, and vcv will occasionally either crash or to exit the program it I’ll have to force quit. Some modules put the cpu in overdrive, like Rackwindows Console, but not on my windows computer.
Others who use Mac will have more useful things to say. Laptops getting too hoot is a common complaint.
Does IAC “All Devices” include IAC itself? That would make midi clock go around in a loop (?)
Try changing that, and see if it has an effect on the CPU usage.
Edit: I’m not a mac user, but i have seen post about “feedback” loops on the IAC bus here and on other forums.
Yeah, not an issue. I have so far not had any problems to do with MIDI in VCV, and even when I delete the MIDI module entirely it doesn’t have an effect of the CPU usage
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I’ve seen it before - when you just have an audio module in the patch, un-connected, it uses a lot of CPU. It’s an artificial patch. Try and connect just an oscillator to the audio module and see if the CPU goes down.
Hi there, you need to connect modules and start building a patch. What you are seeing is “normal” in an empty patch.
Also the fork by Dim that enables realtime priority has noticeable benefits over the official version, both on older macs and M1:
You need to enable “realtime priority” in the menu, and start with engine threads @ 1, only use more if you actually need more.
Diimdeeps version is definitely better, at least on my activity monitor.
But it turns out my problem was exaggerated, it is just one module that causing problems; Rackwindows Console. I don’t know why but it guzzles CPU like crazy and noticeably slows down my system.
Thanks for the tips.
I just posted a pretty long post on using the CPU meters in VCV to find this kind of thing "before it’s too late. Tell me if this is useful: Tricks for using the CPU meters effectively
btw, I just tried Console, and while it does use a lot of CPU, it only does it (for me) when I feed all the channels. By that time the modules I’m feeding it with are using more (or much more) than it.
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Yes Rackwindows Console is known to tax the cpu, set it to “eco” / use it moderately.
Find the thread of Rackwindows developer, he once explained there why it is cpu taxing.
it was just surprising because on my PC, on identical patches, Console barely seemed to at all.
I been using it for a while, first on pc, and now rarely on mac.
In both cases it was taxing the cpu for me (the pc cpu is quit beefy).
Now instead if i wish to have digital “drive/saturation” i use Debratius.
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Just wanted to share a comment/answer from Andrew, on the V2 teaser YouTube video:
“An ARM build (for Mac, Linux, or Windows) won’t be available for Rack 2.0, but this is in our feature request list.”
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thanks for that. sorry for necro bumping this thread but was looking for info on arm build status. i guess it own’t happen until a later more substantial update… or has there been some news on this i missed? searching the forum leads back to this thread.
Nope
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My bottomline: For what most people in here probably do, the M1 Mac Mini is still the absolute sweet spot.
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indeed, it is surprisingly capable. I have yet to get it to hiccup and that is on a single thread given to audio engine in Rack. And the kicker is that it uses mere 47W at full tilt, One can’t idle most all other machines at that power draw…
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I’m very much looking forward to the high-end Mac Mini with M2 Pro. It is expected towards the end of this year.
A while ago I switched to the Mac Mini M1 after running only Linux here for the last 20+ years. I’m happy with the change, the machine itself is far more powerful than my desktop Linux box (6-core AMD FX6300, 16G memory), so performance is naturally enhanced. I think I prefer Linux wrt to normal system operations - the Mac has some really annoying aspects - but there’s no denying that I’m getting much better results with my music work with the Mac.
Curiously, for all the extra software options I now have for the Mac, I’m still mostly running software that I run on Linux (VCV Rack, Bitwig, OpenMusic, Csound, Pianoteq, etc). Very few plugins here.
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