Ableton Forum

I've got an M1 Ultra and, especially on the master channel, Live 11.2.6 barely uses of the cores when I add heavy plugins. Ableton dies, but the M1 Ultra chip is showing 60% usage on one core, and barely anything on the others.

Logic is way better, but still struggles. I can get 6 plugins. But I don't want to use Logic.

I remember when multi-threading came in for Live, it was incredible. With my Core Duo, and Live's new multi-threading activated, I suddenly had 30% more Ableton CPU power!

Why is it so bad on M1/2? Why specifically bad on the master channel?

Can we please add good multithreading to Ableton 11 M1/2 Native asap please! That M1 Ultra is going to waste, and many M1/2 chips.

Thanks

So most DAWs are track or channel specific with cores. Hardly any exceptions to this. So a single track in a DAW is using one core of your CPU. Meaning, it's entirely possible to overload a single channel of a DAW by stacking plug ins on that channel.

On top of that, Live is a "real time" DAW, it like a small amount of other DAWs is geared towards "uninterrupted audio" so adding an instrument or other things you do while the sequencer is running do not affect the audio signal. Logic and other DAWs work on a dual buffer system, they literally will prerender parts of the signal or add latency to get more CPU out of your computer.

So, the Master track will overload any CPU if you start stacking heavy plug ins on it, and you will have latency especially with Logic, but it will handle a little more plug ins than Live.

I think this is down to the fact that a lot of the cores your talking about on the chip are actually GPU cores and not CPU cores.

Current plugins can't utilise GPU cores.

There's a company called GPU Audio https://www.gpu.audio/
who are doing some great work on unlocking this functionality.

It does require new plugins though, either a new plugin standard or a rewriting of the plugin I believe.

They have a beta program you can join to try out their own plugs, but they also have a dev program that means hopefully in the future we'll see more plugin devs adopting this standard and you can leverage all those unused GPU cores in our systems.