Hi there,
So in the past I have noticed that everytime I've installed the bach library, patching in Max becomes really slow and frustrating due to lag spikes whenever a new object or selection is made, even if the patcher is empty. I didnt really know how to fix other than to uninstall bach which did improve things.
However I'm wanting to learn to use bach now so I reinstalled, and got the same lag spikes that I used to get - but I then opened Max in low resolution mode...
Suddenly its as smooth as butter, albeit quite ugly due to the resolution difference.
I know plenty of applications suffer on retina displays, and Max does have a slight performance drop whilst running in full resolution, but the only common factor with the extreme performance drops is the bach library.
Is this a known issue? Can I help/have help troubleshooting this on my system?
Any info would be really appreciated!!
J.
Frustrating Lag on Macbook Retina Displays?
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someone89a
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danieleghisi
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Re: Frustrating Lag on Macbook Retina Displays?
Hi,
what computer model do you have? Retina means you go up in resolution by a factor of 2, meaning 4 times the pixels. Whatever is drawn, is bound to be drawn more slowly and with more CPU charge. This is especially true for bach objects, which have a *lot* of glyphs to draw (we do that vectorially), which means that if you goes up to retina, you have 4 times the effort.
But this is also true for *ALL* max objects, not just bach: as a matter of fact, on my previous computer I had retina turned off constantly because of this, even in patches without any bach objects (just a lot of standard Max stuff). On the current one, that's not a great issue. We decided to keep the quality of vectorial drawing, that was a weighted choice.
You can of course:
- encapsulate any bach.roll/bach.score object you do not need to see
- if you redraw/refresh things with a metro, consider slowing it down
- remove @highlightplay during playback (it's already turned off by default in the new release, that caused lags if many stuff had to be redrawn).
Daniele
what computer model do you have? Retina means you go up in resolution by a factor of 2, meaning 4 times the pixels. Whatever is drawn, is bound to be drawn more slowly and with more CPU charge. This is especially true for bach objects, which have a *lot* of glyphs to draw (we do that vectorially), which means that if you goes up to retina, you have 4 times the effort.
But this is also true for *ALL* max objects, not just bach: as a matter of fact, on my previous computer I had retina turned off constantly because of this, even in patches without any bach objects (just a lot of standard Max stuff). On the current one, that's not a great issue. We decided to keep the quality of vectorial drawing, that was a weighted choice.
You can of course:
- encapsulate any bach.roll/bach.score object you do not need to see
- if you redraw/refresh things with a metro, consider slowing it down
- remove @highlightplay during playback (it's already turned off by default in the new release, that caused lags if many stuff had to be redrawn).
Daniele
Re: Frustrating Lag on Macbook Retina Displays?
Strategies to overcome lag specifically during playback that also work for me (on windows machines) include:
1) zooming way out in Max (not within roll or score; this works the best, I find)
2) making roll or score so long that no re-draws are necessary (the worst lag is usually at re-draws)
3) increasing the average play bar step time
1) zooming way out in Max (not within roll or score; this works the best, I find)
2) making roll or score so long that no re-draws are necessary (the worst lag is usually at re-draws)
3) increasing the average play bar step time