I tested lots of modestly big VCV 2 latest version sequence patches from Patch Storage and on my Mac mini M1 Ultra the CPU gauge goes from about 25% and starts to overheat a lot at about 50% or more. The temperature can go too high if I leave VCV open with any medium big patches but it seems my system performance is weak. I may upgrade to a 4 times faster liquid cooled Origin PC system soon.
iLok & Native Instruments and UAD and a few other things are in my startup and my firewall and Clean My Mac X and UAD console are resident in memory. It’s a clean system so can someone tell me why I can get about 20 tracks and several effects per trackin my DAW but VCV seems to overload everything. What’s the likely problem?
Have you searched for any topics on performance? There are several things you can do to improve it like reducing frame rate and number of cores.
I don’t have a mac but from what I’ve read the M1 runs VCV really well. It’s usually wintel that overheats, if I get a new computer this year I’d go M4 rather than PC.
How much dust in in the vent slots? Sounds like your M1 has cooling issues. If not dust clogged do a full hardware test as that is certainly NOT normal. My M1 (base model) gets warm, but never really hot, even with CPU at near capacity. My M4 is even cooler running, even though it’s near twice as fast as the M1.
I have my eye on a 9 120 mm rgb fan cooled system with 64 megs ram and an Intel Ultra 9 285k in it. I already have my frame rate turned down and number of cores and I really don’t want just twice as fast. I just tried loading a patch that took 15-24% CPU in standalone then loaded a pad in standalone alongside it to test playing and the CPU usage stayed from 34-40% and went to 140 degrees unfortunately. There’s no dust. The strange under 50% overheat behaviour needs troubleshooting!!! I could swear the 285k would be a great boost for me and I tried Windows 11 on Mac Parallels and love it. Huge advance from 10.
I’ve generally seen great performance on my -21 M1 MBP. For a while last year I had thermals issues seemingly triggered by some specific modules (glue the giant for example). There was a VCV point update in the fall though, whose changelog mentioned something related to CPU use I think (forget the exact wording now), and I have not seen these issues since then.
If you’re on the latest VCV version your issue may not be the same as the one I saw. But a couple things to try I guess: Check the Framerate and oversampling options like someone said. Also see if there’s a particular module that seems to trigger the behavior. Turn on the performance meters and look around your patch. Etc.
I have to confess I don’t run VCV on my M1, since it’s my “work” machine. But I will say replaced my intel macbook with the M1 macbook because I couldn’t take the thermal issues of the Intel macbook. Now the fans never turn on, even under pretty high load.
Yeah I’ve also had very good experiences with the M1 generally. I’ve only heard the fan when rendering enormous projects (hour-long full album, 30+ tracks, lots of processing on everything etc), and for a while running relatively small VCV projects last year. Unexpected indeed. But again, the issue vanished with an update at some point.