steff3 wrote:Well, to me it seems these the linked pdfs support exactly what I said - with VIs DP is, with pre-rendering, about half as efficient as Logic (and in my experience Live).
For audio tracks and fx plugins it is different, never said something opposed to that ...
Well, that's the first time I've seen that interpretation of this data, since that's not what it says. With prerendering enabled, DP maxes out at 59 VIs before choking, as opposed to 44 with Logic, i.e. DP is capable of running many more VIs than Logic in a mixing situation (see Mac DAW CPU comparison, 1st page).
The only way one can try to squeeze from this data that Logic is the more efficient is from the buffer reduction experiment. But on a fast Mac, even 128 is an extremely generous setting. On an 8-core, playability is still good even at 512k in most situations I've run into (and I would have liked to see VI data at that buffer setting, since it would give us an idea of the linear relationship of buffer vs. VI count increase for each DAW. From the data as it stands, it seems likely that DP and Logic would show comparable performance at an intermediate buffer setting).
The tradeoff is always there between buffer size and VI count, but in real world use (mine at least,) the more crucial issue is that I be able to keep more VIs running without rendering to audio so that I can edit parts. On that front, DP just trounces everything else.
If you're Jordan Rudess or some similarly insane chop-monster of a player, you may actually be able to feel the difference between 32 and 128k buffers, and in that case, Logic would be your choice for live playing. I stop being able to feel an appreciable difference at settings lower than 256 on the 8-core.
steff3 wrote:The point is - Logic and Live get me twice as far without pre-rendering for VIs and show a much more stable CPU usage than DP. Therefore, the idea behind pre-rendering is great, but it seems to be on top of an architecture that is not competitive with those of other sequencers.
I never use DP without prerendering on. It's essentially transparent to the user, so there's no reason whatsoever to do that absent compatibility issues, which I've never run into and I use a ton of plugs.
With regard to the supposedly "non-competitive" architecture, remember that DP is supporting real-time nondestructive pitch editing on every track. This means in DP, you can go into any monophonic track and display and edit in detail the pitch curve in a MIDI-like fashion without rendering to audio, Melodyne style. Logic doesn't do this; you're stuck using a plugin that does not allow this kind of on-grid pitch editing power or flexibility. So DP's architecture is giving you something more, not less. And with pre-rendering on, it still bests Logic in all but the most demanding live playing scenario. It has to be said that that's a pretty ingenious way to keep all the features while still managing to get better performance.