Kontakt 7 is causing high CPU usage on Mac Studio M1 Max

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  • nightjar
    nightjar Member Posts: 1,322 Guru

    Hang on for hopefully just another day or two... 🙂

  • Intersolar
    Intersolar Member Posts: 6 Member

    Hey guys,

    sorry for the long absence here. I had a lot of things going on with the Apple Support and more but, I found a solution for my problem:

    Return, Refund and switch to a Windows PC!

    And here i like to tell you why:

    The thing i encountered so far and I talked with them (Apple) openly about it, is the core parking. Don´t ask me why not every Mac is infected from this symptom but there are some M1-Macs which have serious trouble.

    It´s a Efficency and Performance core problem or more a system adress problem and i think the solution is, to prevent the cores from parking (but not for the closed eco system of Apple)!

    Why do I think this way?

    After the return i bought a PC with a new i7 13700 K also with P and E cores and what a surprise the same things (not so heavy as on the MAC but still noticeable) happened!

    I read a lot about the architecture of the new generation of CPUs and also found some tools to test it on my PC to get rid of the problem and indeed I solved the problem with an app that prevent the cores from parking!

    Since this i don´t have any troubles, beside the conversion from my loved Mac OS to Win OS (and yes, I don´t like it, but...that´s the price I have to pay) finally I´m happy!

    ...And please don´t talk about the "Oh why do you switched to PC" and the "oh Mac is the best you can get" thing or that you don´t have or had any problems...I´m happy for you but that´s nothing what I had to deal with!

    Please understand:

    If you´re unable to make music for one year and also that the stop came in a high creative phase with much output...which led to a complete absence from making music for one year then i guess you would probably also switch! After this year of not making music it´s still hard to find my way back into it!

  • SaschaFranck
    SaschaFranck Member Posts: 153 Helper
    https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/comment/56571#Comment_56571

    Hasn't got anything to do with the libraries. The same libraries perform considerably worse under Kontakt 7 (Player in my case) than under Kontakt 6 (full). UI responsiveness is just completely horrible, patch loading is slower and once things are loaded, performance is worse, too.

    Same is true for Reaktor. Same ensembles perform WAY worse on silicon Macs than on older machines.

    All this on a brandnew M3 Macbook Air (24GB RAM, 2TB SSD).

    NIs plugins are the only ones I have discovered so far that are doing so bad.

  • SaschaFranck
    SaschaFranck Member Posts: 153 Helper

    Oh, I just noticed this is a comparatively old thread. Well then, the problem still exists - so nobody seems to care about these things any longer.

  • J.Mo
    J.Mo Member Posts: 1 Newcomer

    I have a similar rig: 2023 MacBook Pro M2 Max, 32G, 1T Running Ventura 13.6.7, with my libraries on an external 2T M.2. SSD.

    Been finding the limits of how thick my "action orchestra" can be in Logic before it cries mercy, having upped my game to K14-collectors, with Choir Omni and the Symphony Session versions of the "essentials". (even made my first custom set of patterns in Action Strings 2!) I was pretty happy with the 8-12 instances of Kontakt 7 running before it gives me the CPU overrun pop-up during a bounce (with mastering). Realtime 2-pass helped.

    But today I bought the discount "cross-grade" Action Woodwinds. Even running just one instance of Kontakt 7 in Logic, and just running 1 held note, it glitches every time you switch patterns. It will show 8-14 notes active, CPU will be 4%-10% and disk at 5%, but the CPU will flash red even at 8% or 10%, and I see flashes of it jumping to 14%-24%. Read up on making changes in the standalone Kontakt app to help thing out, and even before making any changes, it runs clean in the standalone app. So unless there is bad code in the AU plug-in version, seems the Host needs to be tuned too.

    (I just want to conduct my virtual orchestra, not chase every packet-loss!)

  • keyman_sam
    keyman_sam Member Posts: 5 Member

    Oh wow this is bad. I was going to switch to an M1 Mac but this isn't very encouraging.

    I was tempted to buy the summer sale (ultimate upgrade) for Kontakt 8, but I'm gonna pause now. Hope NI fixes these perf issues.

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