Ableton Forum

No laggy visuals, no laggy anything. Live looks exactly the same and behaves exactly the same.

Except Live’s cpu usage drops like a stone. On my Mac from 30+% for a new project with no audio, plugins or MIDI in it and audio dropouts once the meter hits 35% to 5-6% and still stable at 70%+..

Unfortunally this does not seem to work for me. I have tried every single advice i could find, including Options.txt, but still experience laggy behaviour, GPU spikes on AMD Radeon Pro, and fans that are runing like crazy. The only thing that works is to hide the Ableton window.... but that is kind of i impracticable.... I use a 16 inch Macbook pro 2019 with Catalina. Anyone else have the same problem?

zangpa wrote: ↑

Sun Feb 16, 2020 1:39 pm

Unfortunally this does not seem to work for me. I have tried every single advice i could find, including Options.txt, but still experience laggy behaviour, GPU spikes on AMD Radeon Pro, and fans that are runing like crazy. The only thing that works is to hide the Ableton window.... but that is kind of i impracticable.... I use a 16 inch Macbook pro 2019 with Catalina. Anyone else have the same problem?

are you using an external display?

Have you tried preventing GPU switching? I remember seeing something about this on Apple’s user forum or help web site but can’t find the link to it, sorry.

I did this to the extreme settings "15" and I noticed ableton became laggy... but I also think my CPU % improved a little....

Is this what it does, make the frame slower? and make the graphics more laggy? How does that improve the CPU?

It basically drops Live’s screen refresh rate. “15” is probably going to be a bit laggy, but I can’t tell the difference in terms of graphics response between 30 and not making the options.txt change.

It made a huge difference to my 2014/15 Retina i7 MBP, which has Intel graphics, and makes hardly any difference at all to my new 2020 27” i9 iMac, which as well as a much faster cpu (and more RAM) has a dedicated video card. The MBP was basically unusable with Live 10 without dropping the refresh rate - an empty default standard project template with the transport not running sent Live’s resource meter to 35%+ and dropouts started when Live’s meter hit around 40%. The options.txt trick dropped Live’s resource meter to 4 or 5% when idle and crackling didn’t start until around 75%.

The WindowServer is a core part of a Mac’s OS, it’s what applications and the OS uses to draw stuff on the display. Things which constantly update tend to use it a lot, and it uses cpu cycles to do its stuff so lots of screen updating can and will increase cpu load.

Another thing which might help reduce graphics load based cpu usage is to use the “reduce transparency” option in the Accessibility part of Settings.

As far as I can see this is not available anymore in Live 11, correct?

As far as I can see this is not available anymore in Live 11, correct?

I'd love to know this as well

cids wrote: ↑

Wed Feb 24, 2021 2:28 pm

As far as I can see this is not available anymore in Live 11, correct?

I just added it on 11.0.2 and get an error:

"The options file [Options.txt] contains an unknown option ‘-MaxFpsMac’ which will be ignored."

spride wrote: ↑

Mon Apr 19, 2021 5:31 pm

cids wrote: ↑

Wed Feb 24, 2021 2:28 pm

As far as I can see this is not available anymore in Live 11, correct?

I just added it on 11.0.2 and get an error:

"The options file [Options.txt] contains an unknown option ‘-MaxFpsMac’ which will be ignored."

I'm getting this same error. Any solutions?

It's still here but the option name's changed. I can't remember it, I probably have the info somewhere around my hard drive, I need to check.
You could also ask to support@ableton.com if I'm not coming back with the answer quickly enough.

Hey! Just found the line today on reddit for Live 11.

Here you go:

"-MaxUiFrameRateHz=30"

or any number you want instead of "30".

Cheers!