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VEPro 7 now available!

Ya, I got that part. If I understand correctly though, wouldn't I be able to run VEP 5 if I loaded it up instead, and therefore run 32 bit Plug ins as long as I didn't save the metaframe in 7?

I tried launching VEPro 5 (with 7 installed), and you definitely can't launch the server - and I think you can't load both AU plug-ins.

The standalone VEPro 5 program did launch, so you could probably use it with IAC MIDI.
 
I tried launching VEPro 5 (with 7 installed), and you definitely can't launch the server - and I think you can't load both AU plug-ins.

The standalone VEPro 5 program did launch, so you could probably use it with IAC MIDI.
I just purchased VEP 7 and this sort of report is undermining my confidence with being able to use V5 when I want to (older projects). :( It looks like opening older V5 projects NOW in V7 will work but once 'saved' they are forever now in V7 (not able to open in V5) - which, if all works just fine no problem, but.... the paranoid part of my brain is screaming - will I have 'issues' working -- moving forward in V7?
 
I just purchased VEP 7 and this sort of report is undermining my confidence with being able to use V5 when I want to (older projects). :( It looks like opening older V5 projects NOW in V7 will work but once 'saved' they are forever now in V7 (not able to open in V5) - which, if all works just fine no problem, but.... the paranoid part of my brain is screaming - will I have 'issues' working -- moving forward in V7?

Well, you can make copies of them and put them in a separate folder.

But I guess that could be an issue if the VE Pro instructions are stored with your sequences rather than as VE Pro Projects?
 
Defimitely save your vep5 frames as separate vep7 files and keep the vep5 ones around just in case. I have not had any problems opening old frame files in vep7 FWIW.

But yes if you want to use vep5 again you will have to uninstall vep7 and install it.
 
More Performance Test results with VEP7

This was mainly to compare Cubase vs LogicPro and DP, both with and without VEP7.

Test Configuration
  1. MacPro 5,1 12 cores x 3.33ghz, 128gb ram, OSX 10.14.5 (Mojave), RX580 video
  2. LogicPro 10.4.4
  3. Cubase 10.0.20
  4. DP10.01
  5. VEP 7.0.826
  6. Audio Buffer at 1024
  7. Test was performed with both application windows showing at 4k native resolution (see image below)
  8. Test Project is E.T. Score tutorial originating from VSL website, it has been modified and runs on Cubase, Logic or DP with exactly same playback midi tracks feeding exactly the same VEP frame. ~100 tracks of VIPro instruments, MirPro and Miracle.
  9. Procedure was to measure total system average CPU usage % every 3 seconds over 3 minutes while playing the first 3 minutes of the score.
  10. Various combinations of Cubase ASIOGuard and LogicPro process buffer size were used to compare. Logic was testing with medium and Large Process Buffer size. DP was tested with low, medium, high audio priority.
Results

pubchart


Full Google Spreadsheet here:

Summary
  1. LogicPro alone: wins the CPU war using 25% average CPU usage.
  2. LogicPro+VEP: 34% avg cpu
  3. Cubase+VEP: 49% avg cpu
  4. DP9+VEP: 38% avg cpu
  5. DP9 alone: 35% avg cpu. Also tried DP10 which performed 5% worse.
  6. Cubase10 alone: can't complete the task, it will not play more than 15 seconds without crapping out. I did try all possible combinations of buffer size, ASIO Guard, etc. Will not play the project.
Notes
  1. I'm thrilled that VEP7 can be used to make up for the fact that Cubase10 on its own has horrible instrument performance on the Mac. And its not terribly worse then LogicPro+VEP and DP+VEP can do. I view VEP7 as essential to use with Cubase on Mac.
  2. LogicPro has some kind of odd PDC situation, which I will call a bug for right now, where if you select an empty track header for playback as is often customary to avoid core spiking issues, then audio is sounding more than one full second later then VEP is processing things, so the VEP meters are out of sync with audio, by at least 1sec. This is most likely a LogicPro bug of some kind, Cubase works normally and even LogicPro works normally if you select one of the instrument tracks into Live mode prior to playback, but other problems can come along with that.
  3. If you want to try to run your own test, you might be wondering how I gathered the CPU usage. I used the following unix terminal command:
    Code:
    iostat -w 3 -I -c 60
    to gather avg cpu every 3 seconds for 3 minutes. Make sure you start it at exactly the same point of the cue as it plays back.
testscreen.jpg
 
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VEP7 is giving me more fits about elicenser problems then I remember from VEP6, but otherwise is very smooth on Mojave so far.

This could just be the usual USB crap (I have to reinsert dongles every once in a while, although I don't think that's happened since I consolidated everything from about six dongles down to two).

But if not, definitely let [email protected] know. There was an issue early on that they fixed.
 
  • Test was performed with both application windows showing at 4k native resolution (see image below)

Just curious, do you notice a difference in performance with different screen resolutions? I have a very similar machine to yours with a Radeon RX560, and I haven't noticed anything.

It takes about 4/5 of a second for Logic to switch screensets, regardless of whether the window configurations span two monitors or not.
 
nearly every day I am getting a LOT of elicenser problems, especially when I switch back and forth between LogicPro, Cubase and VEP. I shouldn't have to reinsert the dongle and its in the back of my machine where its safer, but also less convenient. The problem in my opinion is related to syncronsoft caching. I am going to wait for the dust to settle on VEP7 before posing lots of questions about this, but in a few weeks I plan to do that.
 
Just curious, do you notice a difference in performance with different screen resolutions? I have a very similar machine to yours with a Radeon RX560, and I haven't noticed anything.

It takes about 4/5 of a second for Logic to switch screensets, regardless of whether the window configurations span two monitors or not.

I did extensive testing last week on different display modes. On Sierra and probably High Sierra, yes VEP7 is using substantially more CPU when HiDPI settings are used. Actually its using substantially more just to display the GUI and double that if HiDPI is on. VSL provided me several different test builds to try different things. Nothing has worked so far. However after I upgraded to Mojave all of those GUI related issues went away. In fact in the process of doing all that Martin found some ways to improve GUI performance even more, but only on Mojave. So running VEP7 under Mojave out-performs VEP6 on every count, including big screens sizes and HiDPI too. However, older versions of OSX are going to struggle a bit unless/until they figure out a workaround.

Older versions of OSX are running VEP7 less performantly then VEP6 by all the tests I did, when the VEP gui is active and especially so when HiDPI mode is active. Sierra and probably High Sierra will get best results either using VEP6, or else avoid using HiDPI and avoid having the VEP window open. For now.

Mojave also bench marked 20% faster on my mac with geekbench, compared to Sierra...could have something to do with the GPU and metal assistance, no idea.
 
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However after I upgraded to Mojave all of those GUI related issues went away. In fact in the process of doing all that Martin found some ways to improve GUI performance even more, but only on Mojave. So running VEP7 under Mojave out-performs VEP6 on every count, including big screens sizes and HiDPI too. However, older versions of OSX are going to struggle a bit unless/until they figure out a workaround.

That makes sense, given that Mojave includes a firmware update for our machine.
 
well I went back to VEP6 and Sierra again on my machine after the firmware update to retest using an experimental build from VSL and it was not faster. The firmware is not making our machine faster. The firmware is mostly just so that we can boot from NVMe and APFS devices and stuff like that. The speed improvements are I believe due to Mojave's Metal integration combined with the way VEP7 is coded to take advantage of those Mojave features. The bummer is that these GUI related changes in VEP7 run slower on OSX prior to Mojave. But I have found Mojave very good and solid and snappy and like I said, I scored 20% better with GeekBench, so its all good, I even got my 32bit plugins to work finally. So as of now, no complaints, I'm liking it a lot. folks with older hardware that can't go to Mojave, that's another story, if it were me I'd stay on VEP5/6 until VSL announces they have a fix for older OSX, or be prepared for some extra CPU overhead.
 
I even got my 32bit plugins to work finally

They have a graphic bug on my machine - the UIs, if they show up, are several inches away from where they're supposed to be.

That's in VE Pro - they actually do work right in Pro Tools 10, which only runs 32-bit plug-ins. However, PT 10 has its own menu-drawing graphic issue in anything later than... I think Yosemite.

The firmware is mostly just so that we can boot from NVMe and APFS devices and stuff like that.

I think it's also necessary to support graphics cards with Metal, because you have to go as far as High Sierra with the stock graphics card before putting in the [RX560 in my case].
 
More Performance Test results with VEP7

This was mainly to compare Cubase vs LogicPro and DP, both with and without VEP7.

Test Configuration
  1. MacPro 5,1 12 cores x 3.33ghz, 128gb ram, OSX 10.14.5 (Mojave)
  2. LogicPro 10.4.4
  3. Cubase 10.0.20
  4. DP10.01
  5. VEP 7.0.826
  6. Test was performed with both application windows showing at 4k native resolution (see image below)
  7. Test Project is E.T. Score tutorial originating from VSL website, it has been modified and runs on Cubase, Logic or DP with exactly same playback midi tracks feeding exactly the same VEP frame. ~100 tracks of VIPro instruments, MirPro and Miracle.
  8. Procedure was to measure total system average CPU usage % every 3 seconds over 3 minutes while playing the first 3 minutes of the score.
  9. Various combinations of Cubase ASIOGuard and LogicPro process buffer size were used to compare. Logic was testing with medium and Large Process Buffer size. DP was tested with low, medium, high audio priority.
Results



Summary
  1. LogicPro is able to play the project without VEP with the greatest efficiency, using 25% average CPU usage.
  2. LogicPro+VEP, same tracks, instruments and FX with 34% average CPU
  3. Cubase+VEP can play same tracks at 49% average cpu usage.
  4. DP+VEP can do it at around 45% avg cpu, but I'm not sure if there is some config I can do to make it better.
  5. Cubase ASIOGuard did not improve performance, in fact better performance happened with ASIOGuard off.
  6. Cubase alone cannot play the project with or without ASIO Guard.
  7. I haven't done DP alone yet, will update here if I do.
Notes
  1. I'm thrilled that VEP7 can be used to make up for the fact that Cubase10 on its own has horrible instrument performance on the Mac. And its not terribly worse then LogicPro+VEP, and very close to what DP+VEP can do.
  2. LogicPro has some kind of odd PDC situation, which I will call a bug for right now, where if you select an empty track header for playback as is often customary to avoid core spiking issues, then audio is sounding more than one full second later then VEP is processing things, so the VEP meters are out of sync with audio, by at least 1sec. This is most likely a LogicPro bug of some kind, Cubase works normally and even LogicPro works normally if you select one of the instrument tracks into Live mode prior to playback, but other problems can come along with that.
  3. VEP7 is giving me more fits about elicenser problems then I remember from VEP6, but otherwise is very smooth on Mojave so far.
testscreen.jpg


Thank you so much for doing this!
And do we predict that ultimately with a stable vep 7 version Logic + VEP will outperfom Logic without VEP?
 
no I don't think so, Logic performs very well on its own. That is lowest CPU scenario I have tried so far, but I'm still messing around with DP and I plan to run Reaper through the same tests at some point.

But keep in mind there are operational advantages to using VEP, despite that you need a little more CPU overall then if you just use LogicPro alone. And Cubase is crippled without VEP! DP looks like it might be also a bit crippled without VEP, but I'm still working through how to optimize it, I'm not that expert at using DP, but its doing some weird stuff, even while idle, spinning the CPU in "realTime" mode, way more then the other DAW's. There must be a setting to stop that from happening but I have not found it yet, but basically I can get the DP+VEP performance almost as low as Logic+VEP. But DP alone, is not doing very well either, but it might be something about MirPro and ViPro that is not happy with DP...more later.....
 
I think it's also necessary to support graphics cards with Metal, because you have to go as far as High Sierra with the stock graphics card before putting in the [RX560 in my case].

Not that that it really matters, but no Metal has nothing do with the firmware. The firmware is really pretty simple and very very low level dealing with your CPU and microcodes that can effect how it performs, and the ability for the motherboard to be able to read certain file systems before OSX has loaded, and things like that. You can use the new firmware with Sierra and older OSX too.

The firmware was updated in High Sierra mainly for APFS support, otherwise you would not be able to boot up from an APFS drive, for example.

Later on was another firmware update that enabled NVMe drives to boot up before OSX is loaded..

recently a security vulnerability was found related to hyper threading, so believe it or not Intel just recently announced this vulnerability and the only protection is to disable hyper threading with potential loss of performance as much as 40%. Yes you read that right. So a recent firmware update provides support to turn off hyper threading (Which I don't plan to do by the way). Other CPU oriented security vulnerabilities have sometimes had to be resolved through a firmware update.

OSX, on the other hand, was improved in Mojave by adding many graphics oriented routines that make use of the Metal framework...its all software in OSX...such that Mojave requires a Metal card. This makes Mojave more efficient because its utilizing the GPU of your video card do some some of the desktop rendering, etc.. The Firmware is not involved there really

here is a list of the firmware updates from the past couple years and more info about it:

https://forums.macrumors.com/thread...requisite-to-disable-hyper-threading.2132317/
 
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