REAPER GUI Speed !?!

Hey guys, I was just writing a FLS & Reaper answer in this forum. That made think about the GUI speed of reaper. See, I still use FLStudio and REAPER on my 2.4Ghz Athlon (Single Core), 1,5GB RAM and a Dual Head Matrox Millenium G550. In FLS, everything runs very smooth. I never feel uncomfortable with the GUI. Especially in the piano roll moving & creating notes, scrolling and stuff like that is perfect. Also in the play list, moving and drawing patterns and audio clips is extremely smooth even with 60 patterns and lots of clips in the play list. Now, if I use REAPER on larger projects, I see long delays while scolling and zooming in & out. Especially the MIDI editor appers to be very slow sometimes while scrolling. And when I move or change notes sometime it hangs and suddenly the note is too big and the runs out of screen. I tried the new alpha which looks really fancy but IMO its even slower. Do you see similar problems? What do you think about that? Are there any plans to improve the GUI speed? -Jan

It's been talked about many times before. Reaper regularly renders and paints graphics to the screen as opposed to (I think...) the way some other hosts *may* (don't know this for sure) render virtual graphics outside of the visual areas so scrolling seems smoother. My - guess - is that the graphics for everything (even things out of view like a virtual desktop?) are already rendered in the latter case and that Reaper apparently re-renders everything (or some things) in realtime whenever you scroll things. You can sometimes see the screen redraws with the naked eye. One way to see that is to pull the navigator vertically way down - and then back up - with a lot of tracks and watch the TCP's coming into view render/redraw, and watch the cpu meter go up a bit. You'll also see the tracks move after the TCP's as opposed to things just smoothly moving together. Keep moving the navigator up/down and you'll see it. It seems to be a "move what's already rendered into view" thing (sliding virtual graphic spaces like the virtual desktop analogy) vs. a "re-render this from scratch over here now" thing to me. Not a big deal considering what you can do with the application though.

Hmmm, I'm not really sure what you mean. Do mean that REAPER does not support double buffering? This flickering is one thing. But the handling fell not right, too. I mean if you click on something in FL (not, pattern, audio clip) and you drag it around it does exactly what I want and it feels exactly how I'd like it. But in REAPER its a bit rough... I can't really explain it in detail, it just the feeling that I have comparing both DAWs.

Yeah, it appears Reaper's GUI rendering gets "stuck" often, making it feel unresponsive. I don't particularly know about the MIDI editor but zooming and scrolling projects with even moderately heavy amounts of audio items tends to feel slow and unresponsive. There may be too big updates that happen for each (even minor) GUI change or something like that.

hmm, yeah... Seems like that. But I think its not really possible to just move the previously redered areas anyway because the name of audio clips move while scrolling. So if any audio item is clipped on the left side due to scrolling, the name will move so you can still read it. This makes it impossible to just move the whole area.

in my beginning days in the Reaperforum I had a hard time with this also, only then it would also affect the audio (and this was for me, there were others not noticing this, but that being said I was not alone). I can't remember which update it was, but one day a new Reaper saw the light of day and helped me with the audio side of things - the gfx "thing" is still there though. Now, I'm not the most articulate so maybe I couldn't explain myself clear enough (happening again, perhaps;)), but it took ages before such a simple explanation that Lawrence now has given was offered to me - actually, until now! he he After the audio-fix, I made a request for the gfx "thing", because it just seemed like such a downer for newcomers, sort of amateurish. Now though I'm not that bothered. If there will be a fix - great! If not, well, as long as it sounds and works as good as it does now, I'm not THAT concerned;)

That 4% was just for maximizing a window and to be fair, Cubase doesn't read the real cpu, just the ASIO usage. Doing the same in Cubase give a tiny peak on the real cpu meter also so that wasn't really a fair comment. In reality, on my laptop it's roughly 15% more cpu usage in Reaper than Cubase doing graphic things like heavy scrolling. And then of course the visual lag on top of that. This is Vista also so that could play into it. Dunno. To it's credit, it does seem to hold back those graphics generally in favor of audio playback... the lag?

Another thing to add is that the GUI in FL Studio is tightly coded and makes heavy use of 3DNow+ (AMD) and SSE1 (Intel) instructions for rendering. FL doesn't run on PCs that do not support SSE1. The GUI in FL is so fast and responsive,that I can do almost anything even with a 6-year old single core 1.8GHz AthlonXP CPU loaded at 99%. Reaper's (alpha) GUI performance is still a far cry from the blazing-fast experience of FL (especially FL6). IL added transparencies and more bloat in FL7 and FL8 to make it more "Vista-friendly",but the performance hit was minimal (almost as responsive as before)

The apparent hanging of reaper when zooming scrolling could probably be fixed if scroll and zoom events (mousewheel and keystrokes) were deleted from the queue, and then when a new event arrives it gets executed. No idea if this is possible or what the implications would be for gui speed. It is however a tad annoying when you have scrolled to much and you have to wait a couple of secs until you cau use the gui again.

Yeah something should be done on that respect. Another thing is the sometimes slow response, when changing selection of items or tracks in bigger projects, even if there's no scrolling or zooming involved. Selecting a near neighbour track is ok, but if I select a track some numbers further away, it feels like walking througn mud. The only thing that changes on the screen is the selected track's highlight. Don't know if this a drawing issue, but it slooooows me down a big rate.