Hello, I come with a very specific question:

I have a Mac pro 5.1; I installed Monterey with Open-core on an SSD; works perfectly, 12GB ddr3 1333

It occurred to me to install Ableton Live 12, configure it to optimize resources, etc. and it seems very strange to me that it has such a high load on the CPU, apparently the average in the demo set is 67 and sometimes 80%; and the truth is that it is noticeable when you clip at 100... (small unpleasant cuts...) I decided to put Ableton live 11... but things are still quite similar, so it occurred to me; What if Ableton is not optimized to use 2 processors?...

The Mac Pro model I have has 2 processors; 2xE5645, although I know that you can put more powerful ones (5690). ..my doubt is if it would work. ..,

I have serious doubts if Ableton uses my processors 100%. With "Mac-fan" I have been observing the temperature and apparently the CPUA gets hotter than the B...with Ableton Maybe you have to put some command or line of code so that it takes all its power. ..I don't know.

P.S: One might think that it is the lack of ram memory but, try putting 20 GB; It feels like it only uses 1 of the 2 CPUs. I also thought that the SSD cannot deliver enough speed, with an nvme pci it would reach a quite interesting speed but again, it doesn't seem to be anything other than the cpu. Any ideas?. Hugs to all.

 

I wonder if it's just that with Monterey, and the last OS that the 5,1 can run is Mojave "officially", and OpenCore is still obviously under development and unsupported, and couldn't be considered 'stable' in the rock solid sense one would like, and certainly not thought of when the guys in Berlin are coding Ableton, .... all these things kinda add up especially this far down the road with the system and macOS you know?

I have 2 5,1's and I used them dearly for decade plus, and often thought of delidding them and putting in new processors etc back in 2016-17-18 and whatnot, ... but with the move to Apple silicon, and some time off, I just decided to put those systems on ice, so that I can always access older/legacy projects and whatnot (as I have 100's and 100's of songs/cues/etc on them with plugins that will never ever run later OS's, let alone apple silicon etc.

I have a feeling the next few years are going to be a little painful for those great 5,1's that have been hotrodded and whatnot, as they simply can't do what we will want them to, and functionality is dropping off....

 

That's just how it is with a 14 years old architecture. Every entry level M1 Mac Mini or MacBook has multiple times the power of this system, using only 20 watts instead of 200. Use it as it is or upgrade to a new machine. These old CPUs are also missing many instruction sets like AVX what makes them slow or even unable to run some modern code that relies on them.

 

I am also using Mac Pro 5.1, 2 Intel Xeons, 96gb RAM, internal SSDs. I just installed Live 11 recently to open some projects that were sent to me. They are roughly 1gb each, and they are in the alternative music genre. So they are similar in track counts ~ 20-30. They play but there is no way I could work with them performing the way they are.

In comparison, I have Logic projects where I can work with no hinderance at all, with track counts of 60+ stems/multitrack audio files, and others with over 100 channels.

When taking that into account, plus Ableton's inability to fix their Plugin Delay Compensation; coupled with it's External Hardware Latency Compensation not working, Live 11 is gone. -> I have better stuff to do. Nor do I care to hear proposed solutions from those using single CPU computers. On 5.1 Mac Pro it is a waste of time. If I have to install Ableton again, it will be on my i7 Macbook Pro. That's not going to happen either.

 

Yeah, sounds like you have the system as the two I have pretty much... and they are great, and served me well since their release until more or less recently... I stopped upgrading at Mavericks on one and I think Sierra on the other.. (will find out this week when I unbox one of them to access things on it I want)... and I stopped at Ableton 9.6 or so'ish... maybe tried 10 on one... What OS are you running on it?

And they were monsters for a long time, with extremely high track counts in Ableton, easily over 120 tracks on some larger productions for film songs or whatnot... but yeah, I am sad that their growth for me kinda terminated and honestly I just needed a more mobile setup that was powerful enough, and 3 generations in to the M chipped line, a lot of the growing pains with not being able to find native versions or whatnot have abated...

Logic was always ahead of the game back then in terms of a lot, but seems to not be as much "now" (although I am not at all going to disagree with your PDC and external hardware comp issues at all)....

 

Part of the Mac Pro 5,1 gang here too. Dual Xeon x5680 12 core/24 threads. Mojave.

What you're experiencing is normal. Even Ableton 10 runs super poorly on my machine compared to Logic Pro. I guess Logic Pro gets a solid advantage due to optimization.

Main thing killing the 5,1s nowadays is the lack of new instruction sets (as someone else mentioned), but mainly its the ABYSMAL single core performance. Midi playback and plugin stacking on a single channel are really tough on these old systems. Huge projects with a ton of audio tracks still work very well for me.

To my understanding almost all DAWs are only able to use a single core per track.

If you have one track loaded with plugins it can lead to system overload even if all 5 other cores have nothing happening on them.

But a trick that works in Logic for me is to route a channel to an AUX channel and split my plugin chain across both channels. Now I'm able to use 2 cores for 1 channel! (Not sure if this works for Ableton tho)

You could consider the hackintosh route for a newer processor like an i7-8700 or i7-10700 and get substantially better single core performance and thanks to the newer CPU designs and architecture get near identical multicore performance to the dual CPU Mac pros.

Note: Tbh I don't think any of these programs are specifically designed for dual processor systems, or even have special modes for dual CPU systems.

Dual CPU systems inherently have more latency for CPU processes to occur due to the CPUs being physically separate. I'm not sure how much of an impact this has on DAW performance tho.

 

Last edited: Apr 9, 2024