Just saw first new skin on reddit
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Ah, thanks! That sounds very useful!
I used that relative velocity on a patch, just to find out how it behaves, i opend up the filter, because its easy to hear, but with the bus, you can have send fx, so you can use a parallel send and cut out some of the highs on the sends or emphasize the playing. Really a nice thing. i belive i should get an mpe controller.
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That’s misleading.
Consider CPU as a bunch of buckets (CPU cores) where - simplifying a lot - each track goes to its own bucket, and if you have more tracks than you have buckets you’re adding the additional load 1 by 1 to the buckets that are already filled.
Performance meters in the DAWs therefore show you - again, simplifying a bit - how much of the most occupied bucket is used, because even if you have 16 buckets (cores) but just one of them overflows, the project will start to glitch, because DAW can’t (again, simplifying just a bit) share the load created by one track between many buckets.
So, if you drop S2 on a track, follow it up with a complex Reaktor FX patch and then finish it with Ozone, then you can easily kill your performance even if there’s nothing on your other tracks - DSP meter in DAW will show e.g. 100% use, even though your resource monitor / task manager will show 1/n% where n is number of buckets/cores your CPU has.
DSP (digital signal processing) use is not CPU use.
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Hopefully soon we will get some optimization. Not into buying a new pc just for one synth
@antic604 I meant the meter in the DAW, not the CPU graph in my OS. Sorry if that was poor wording.
The point was, if you add one instance of a synth and it looks super hungry, it doesn’t necessarily multiply up in terms of performance hit. The same held with many other plugins I tried. So seeing the DAW meter jump a bit while trying a few presets doesn’t mean the synth will be unusable in a real context.
Also, these super-hungry factory patches are often just showing off and nobody even uses them in a track. Some of the one-key entire track presets are just to prove a point of what’s possible, nobody’s using this stuff. All the synth youtubers are programming Phase Plant patches with 20 FX on the end, half the time you turn most of those FX off and you can’t hear the difference!
Makes great content though right?!
To be honest I think that if you need a new computer every 5 years to enjoy the latest toys for your profession or your main hobby, it just goes with the territory!
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Yes, that was my point as well - DSP meter (in a DAW) shows the utilization of most occupied core, not of the CPU as a whole. So, up to a point, adding tracks doesn’t increase it.
Really, there should be a better way to handle this 
In Ableton Live and Reaper (well, these are the ones I know about) you can view per track cpu usage. A good way to check impact across different tracks. I guess lot’s of you are using Live (In Live 12, click the triangle at the bottom right corner of Live to show the Mixer Config menu, then enable Performance Impact).
But yeah, when you’re browsing presets in synths like Serum, there’s usually a lot you can turn off.
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Tested Serum 2 under Gig Performer (some presets are great but some others are draining the CPU down…Xfer needs to optimise their software for sure). GP does not utilize multi-threading so something like Reaper with multi-thread support would be a better candidate if you need more than one instance of Serum at a time but with GP you can have 100 instances of Serum inside individual/separate Rackspaces and go from one Rackspace to the next by a click of a button making it ideal for live scenarios (it doesn’t load all Serum instances at once like Reaper does) plus it has great ‘audio tailing’ when you switch sounds.
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Loaded the demo.
Tried a plinky plonk patch.
Got 212% cpu usage.
Will not be purchasing.
Edit: Might I recommend Fors?
(I have a great deal of admiration for Steve Duda, but what the sh—is this?)
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I’m not sure what processors Serum 2 doesn’t run well on, but I have an M1 pro Macbook Pro and an intel meteor lake ultra 155u thin and light laptop. On the mac I can have Serum on highest quality and sure, some patches go up to 35-40% CPU usage per core/instance, while on the intel it’s slightly less at the medium quality setting. I haven’t noticed any spikes either, seems quite stable. I went through mostly the whole patch library. Maybe it’s specific processors?
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I would argue, and i see that some people share my opinion, that PhasePlant already had almost all of the options that Serum 2 has now, years ago. And more
So it’s not even that revolutionary synth as some are claiming.
Not knocking down Duda and Dave, i am still using Serum and Dmg plugins, almost all of them to this day, but Serum 2 looked like it was rushed a bit, and too many music production youtubers seams to hype this product out hard, and you can see even their macs or pcs are struggling (except the ones who hide it from the video).
I tried to play with it last night, and immediately got some cool sounds, but i was hitting 50% + on cpu, and it was the only track in my project.
For now i just see it as experimental vst to create something and export as audio when doing production.
Compared to previous version where you can drop many instances of serum on a project
@kokosnuss Probably fair comment that it isn’t revolutionary. It’s an evolution of an existing product, brought up-to-date with some new features, and an improved sound engine etc.
I’ve said it a few times recently (here and elsewhere) but it’s pretty narrow margins now with all the modern soft synths like Pigments, Hive, Phase Plant, Serum 2, and others that I can’t think of right now. You can get very similar results and do the same sort of sound design stuff with most of them.
At this point, I think it becomes more about usability and personal taste in the GUI and the workflow. Yes, there are differences in sound and they may have distinct character to some extent but you can basically get the same results with any of them. Regarding e.g. Phase Plant, it has such a love/hate interface and that can’t be avoided. I’ve tried to get used to it but I just can’t tolerate it. It becomes a spaghetti to me very quickly. That’s just me though, and clearly many others love that thing!
I would also add that there’s nothing wrong with having multiple tools that do similar things if it means you get variety and the differences in approach might inspire different outcomes. Sometimes you just ned a change of scenery to get you out of a block.
Regarding the CPU usage - they will definitely do work in that area. It’s very common to get a product feature-complete for launch and then do that sort of optimisation afterwards.
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I agree, and hope so. 
Just tried the demo for a bit and it hits between 25-30% cpu on my M4 Max on some outlier patches, which is definitely the most (almost double) of any plugin I’ve ever used up until now.
I guess there will be some optimisations down the line, because it seems fairly random which patches are hogs and which aren’t. 
For me the most hungry patches are the ones that employ lots of fx, admittedly I’m on a quite old ryzen5 desktop but it’s 12 core so it should theoretically be able to handle what serum is throwing at it, it’s shame there isn’t a standalone version so we could see if it’s daw related or not, at the moment I’m having difficulty with some vst3 inside of live, specifically the korg stuff, it’s basically unusable unless I host it inside of blue cat patchwork…
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Oh yeah, it has a comprehensive fx section as well. Hadn’t really checked that out.
I’m sticking with Massive X for the moment though. I’m really gelling with its interface and workflow even though it might not be as comprehensive as some of its competitors.
Design 4 filters and morph through them is pretty sick. I rebuild a patch from dash glitch, where you switch the oscillator levels with mod remap and a macro scanning through the mod remap feature on the oscillator levels, and you can xmodulate the oscillators. While only sending one to the filter. Also mod remap on send fx bus to alter the send fx. Yes that sound got me to 40 percent cpu, but i can build a track around that patch
Optimizations are surly needed. And the question is if every patch needs that complexity, we are test driving it now. (But its a fun ride, and some things i would like to really use now from now on.)
But i thought i continue with Hive2 and wait what happens.
I just realised I can run patchwork in standalone, tried it with serum 2 with the exact same results, the patches that are worst for me are the factory arps, they’re glitchy as hell, luckily they’re something I have little use for so it’s no big deal to me, at least I know it’s not daw specific like the korg stuff…
Just ran Serum in Live, all oscillators used in a pad patch, plenty of FX, holding five-note chords, using Arpeggiator, lots of movement, never hit 20% (hovered around 16-18). Tried multiple patches, with similar results. I get roughly the same results using Falcon, running a Synth Anthology patch with plenty of FX and modulations, with unison creating 6-8 voices per patch, and then holding down a 3-5 note chord. Using M1 MacBook Pro. Will try it on my M4 Mac mini when I get home.
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