Spent all day trying to figure out why some presets in UVI’s Quantum Metal and Wood expansion eat up ALL the CPU on my 2019 8-core Mac running OS Monterey.
Literally, playing one note on some of these presets
causes the audio to stutter and my CPU meter goes all
the way to the red. It happens in Digital Performer, Logic, and Pro Tools, so it isn’t a DAW specific issue.

Meanwhile, Kontakt 6 (and 7) barely register any CPU hit.

I checked UVI’s website, and saw the following information..

“UVI Falcon and UVI Workstation do not support
multi-core threading.”

So, I guess this means Falcon operates on just one core, meaning it doesn’t matter how many cores you have.

Is this correct? It would explain why I’m getting such high CPU usage with Falcon, although it doesn’t completely explain why the Quantum expansions are such
CPU killers. Some expansions, such as Meteor, are not as hard on the CPU.

If anyone has similar experiences with UVI products, and has found a workaround, I’d love to hear from you.

Thanks and peace.

That's correct. But per instance. Whereas Kontakt can spread a single instance over multiple cores.

A single instance of falcon is thread bound. But using more than one instance would likely load multiple cores, each with an instance.

If any of that makes sense lol.

And the patches are not 1:1 comparisons, depending on the complexity of what's happening in the patch with real-time effects and managing voices (or anything that takes time to process), some will be heavier on cpu load than others.

Increasing the buffer size and/or lowering sampling rate would likely help (at least a little), if any of that is feasible.

Thank you so much for your answer. Yes I increased buffer and I’m always at 44.1khz sample rate. I also
set polyphony on certain presets to 4 notes limit and that has also helped.

Good call on the polyphony. That should be a big help.

Multithreading isn't actually all that important in DSP as the audio buffer is most often processed linearly; for instance, a plugin might apply EQ, then Delay, then a Reverb, but there isn't any way to parallelize these processes, as each depends on the output of the prior. Multithreading can be useful for background tasks like buffering/loading samples but that's about it. if you've loaded, say, a virtual instrument and then added a bunch of effects plugins, each plugin must also wait for the previous plugin in the chain to finish. In Audio processing, multithreading and multiple cores aren't exactly useless, but it's far less useful than in video rendering, games, and things that contain multiple systems and processes ripe for running In parrelel.

As a side note, I find the wording here to be quite strange as there is nothing to "support:" you just create /dispatch a new thread when needed in your program, plugin, or whatever. Perhaps they mean multithreading isn't supported in their scripting language (not familiar with UVI)? If that's the case, neither would Kontakt's scripting support multithreading, as it's a dead-simple, basic scripting system...

Kontakt runs its voices and fx, etc in parallel. Being that it's not just a chain of independent serial processing, like a bunch of individual fx, it can organize tasks (especially per voice) on different cores. It's a little more complicated than just dispatching new threads, as you then have to use a type of fence to synchronize things (not unlike modern gpu programming).

When UVI says Falcon/Workstation doesn't "support," they mean that each instance is thread bound. Kontakt does not have this limitation, which could be argued is one of Falcon's biggest competitors.

Update on the situation..I’ve been in an email exchange with UVI about the issue with Falcon and Quadra expansions. I still cannot play one note of a preset in
Quadra Metal and Wood without my CPU meter going full red and my DAW audio engine failing. Whether it’s
the fault of whoever coded the Quadra (and to a lesser extent, Augmented Orchestra), it is still unacceptable
for a product I paid for.

UVI said they couldn’t reproduce the issue, so I made a video of it happening and sent that to them. Hopefully
they will be able to replicate the issue there. Meanwhile, I simply cannot use the Quadra expansions in Falcon (or UVI workstation). Sad because these products
really do sound fantastic.

What about lowering quality for playback/MIDI recording and keep HQ for rendering? Would that be possible?

I can reproduce this problem on a 2019 16 core Mac Pro, in Logic at 44.1KHz with a 256 buffer into an Apollo X8.

Loading the second preset in the 01Cloud folder 'Blade Dreamer' I can't even play a single note without the engine spluttering and crackling to a halt. This happens when using either Falcon or UVI Workstation.

The standalone versions don't have the same issue so it seems to be a DAW problem. It actually doesn't seem to have the issue in Cubase or in Studio One if you use the VST plugin. If you load the AU plugin into Studio One though, you get the crackling and breakup - interesting. That might help UVI to narrow down the problem.

A friend of mine is running Audiogridder alongside Ableton Live (on the same (Xeon workstation) computer, because it distributes processing load better than that DAW.
Might want to give that a try?
https://audiogridder.com

Thanks for confirming. I am going to copy your reply to
UVI tech support. There is something definitely wrong with these Quadra expansions. I think it’s a resources
issue, as I discovered yesterday that muting one or two
parts in a Quadra preset lowers the CPU hit. Which part? It depends on the preset. And a few presets are not CPU killers, which is even more perplexing.

Thanks to the other replies. There is no “lower quality
setting” in either Falcon or the expansions. And the Audio Gridder suggestion is valid, but I don’t see why one would should have to resort to a kluge just to use
an expansion in a plugin. The Quadra expansions should simply work, or UVI should put a disclaimer on their website warning people.

Yeah, tell me about it. But other people experiencing this might just want work around the issues and get it working right now. One thing does not exclude the other, right?