Hi,
I tried searching, but all other posts that are somewhat in line with my issue are years old. Not sure if there’s been any improvements.
The GUI lags significantly on OSX Mojave on a brand new 2018 MB Pro, no plugins all native stuff only, I’m guessing its 8-14 FPS. Which makes it quite nasty to work with.
Is this still a known issue ? If so, any workarounds ?
rh
What a pity, Apple ruined it once again. Not helpful for you, but maybe for others: Stay where you are, best is to stay at Sierra, if you want working audiounits, and stay High Sierra, if you don’t want low fps. Until there is any sign of life from the devs.
redhoot: The only idea I have is that you try low resolution mode, you can set it in the Renoise.app properties.
@ffx , thanks. Launching in low resolution solved my issue!
Hopefully we can get native retina support in the future.
Thank god for this thread. Ugh.
Exactly same issue. Under preferences I changed default 60fps to 30fps. Restarted and GUI rendering perfect.
Funny, I got one for Christmas and experience a similar thing with Logic running Alchemy on it. It was slower than my old one so I just returned it. It seemed like the issue might have been that I ported all data from the old one onto the new one and but the old one had glitches on it which the new one didn’t know how to deal with. When I opened up the laptop clean without all my ported data Alchemy ran fine. Never tried running Renoise on it, though.
So you might want to start from scratch on the new one and see if you still have these problems.
When I opened up the laptop clean without all my ported data Alchemy ran fine. Never tried running Renoise on it, though.
I think you experienced a “random” kind of change, e.g. Spotlight was not indexing in the background, so more cpu was available, or similar. The current and last macbook (pro) generation has some real design flaws (too thin and poor thermal ventilation). It is said to be not capable of running the cpu at maximum speed for more than 1 minute, then the thermal control in the device will already downclock the cpu quite drastically. Since the Renoise GUI is basically drawn by CPU (I proofed this by doing some tests, although I found CoreGraphics and Quartz? references in the code), the lower the CPU speed, the less fast the GUI will be. Single core speed is the key.
I also have this (maybe totally wrong) theory: Apple once did gpu accelerate CoreGraphics or Quartz. But with the introduction of the new Metal framework, they switched CoreGraphics to CPU, since also older Macs will then “feel” older, too. Esp. if you are using a normal CoreGraphics GUI with Retina, and the system doubles the pixels, it seems to be done fully by CPU. Only if the developer now completely switches to Metal 1/2, it will be fixed (OpenGL was discontinued by Apple, too). This is kind of loose/loose-situation for all developers targeting macOS: Supporting another proprietary Apple graphics API has been proven as not a good idea. Apple could decide in 3 years that Metal 2 is outdated. I think in a situation like Taktik is with Renoise, he seemed to write the whole GUI system himself, it must be pretty frustrating. Such amount of extra work, only because Apple does very bad decisions.
That second part kind of went over my head, but yeah, it’s pretty shocking that they could get away with shipping a device that is straight up worse in most situations. Thankfully If I end up sticking with Renoise (it’s been 4 months now) I won’t have a reason to get another macbook unless I really miss the timestretch options Logic offers.
I just updated to mojave and have this issue, 30 fps limit in preferences didn’t work for me.
hello fellow forumers who avoid posts with same topics. try launching in low-resolution mode ffs, it’s asked like 100 times (and answered)…
Taktik also already confirmed that he is currently working on a Retina/Hires-GUI update, so then it will hopefully perform better.
As I described, Apple seems to have disabled any GPU acceleration for their standard base graphics system framework “Cocoa” (another stupidity by Apple), maybe to force the developers to switch to their proprietary, Apple only GPU Metal framework (it is very anti attractive to developers since proprietary and not cross platform). Renoise worked ok in upscaling, blame Apple for this. Renoise is not the only software, there are a lot of VST vendors having the same issue. Apple really changed in a bad way. Times are over when Apple developed crossplatform APIs like Webkit or OpenCL. Or did actually care for the needs of their users.
You can do this yourself:
i wouldn’t buy apple for my personal pc even if it was last pc on earth 
(i hate that in my company we have policy in our team that mbpro is a “must”)
i don’t need shiny things, i’m more comfortable in terminal 
Currently, as things stand, any of you can live perfectly with a PC under Windows 10 (and most companies). The latest 1903 version has improved a lot and Renoise works perfectly on it. In addition, it is currently possible to get an original license for this operating system at a really ridiculous price (less than € 2). By the way, I have nothing to do with Microsoft.
With more reason you have to move. Lately we are reaching totally absurd situations of totally exorbitant prices for everything. DAWs with prices for the clouds (see Pro Tools, and above changing to pleasure), VSTi with totally excessive prices (there are many examples), even more and more expensive hardware devices. Today having and maintaining a home studio is a luxury. All that remained was for operating systems to make it more difficult the coexistence of the software, tso customers must spend more money. And again to hit the wheel.
If Apple causes you so many problems, why don’t you send it to hell? Software developers will be tired of updating for them and having to wait for certain things to be fixed. Having a perfectly viable alternative such as Windows 10.
I understand that Windows 10 is not the ideal operating system, because it is based on maintaining support for previous versions, that is, it is not an operating system designed from scratch, totally new. But it works perfectly, it does not hang, the audio is going well, and Renoise is going perfectly, as well as most DAWs on the market. The audio works perfectly. If there is a problem, it is probably the cause of the brand of the device and its drivers.
Another example off topic. Have you seen what an annual Autocad software license costs? This is software that has been amortized for many years, earning a lot of money. And now the price is exaggeratedly high for everything. Engineering university students will use Autocad. When they have to buy it they think twice. It is not worth going to work to earn money, and then all this type of companies absorb everything… The monthly subscription is ruining many customers.
As long as there are “sheep” customers who continue to buy from this kind of companies, price abuses will continue.
Then another joke matter. Have you seen those youtubers who show in their videos the legion of VSTi instruments and libraries that are worth a lot of money? Have you made calculations of how much money all that is worth? Is incredible.
Now think about this whole context. Are you still at Apple?
my personal would be either archlinux either ubuntu (renoise works awesome there, and my setup is complete)
just to add my 2 cents: just because apple is so much greedy doesn’t make microsoft any “better”.
Why would i even bother using microsoft, as licence is not the issue, because environment is. Like mac, if you buy mac, that’s expensive, but wait to get started using apps of which all are expensive and cost… i simple avoid that path. Linux does what i configure it to do, nothing bloated, no wasted cpu cycles, no data collection, no underlying com.apple services lurking most of time…
~worries~ gone
(please remove if inappropriate, i know it’s a bit off topic)
i’m refreshing page all the time since i see Taktik is replying
Very low FPS on a 2018 MB pro
Just to confirm: This will, very likely, be caused by the Retina display of your new Mac Book. Old, non HiDPI applications are getting upscaled by OSX and this seems to be awfully slow on some systems. We’re aware of this and working on a fix.
And yes, Apple’s update policy indeed is a big pain. With every new OSX release a big bunch of their core APIs change and a lot of old stuff gets broken.
Instead of trying to be backwards compatible, as all others do (Windows, Linux), they rely on eveyone else to follow their changes. And this unfortunately works, because many developers depend on the OSX platform, so they hurry “fixing” their applications as soon as new OSX releases arrive. Have a look at any bigger Audio plugin’s changelog. It’s scattered with “Updated for OSX X.Y.Z” entries.
I know a lot of people who work with Audio and Video softwares, who got a set of old OSX machines, whose only purpose is to run old software which is longer supported or working on newer OSX versions. Apart from being a security risk (old OSX version also don’t get security updates anymore) this really is a pain in the ass to work with. In the video processing world OSX already is more or less dead because of this. The new Apple Pro won’t change this. It comes a few years too late.
Probably it’s time to ditch the Renoise OSX port, or at least mark it “deprecated”. The time we gain by no longer maintaining this mess could be spend better into Renoise’s “core” features or it’s Linux port.
Right on the target!
exactly!
well said Taktik!
Please don’t abandon it? I’m on a Mac, and it’s a 2018 Mac Mini that runs Renoise perfectly with no issues at all. Renoise is too good to abandon, and it would be awful to me to not be able to use any new features that you would tuck into updates. All of my softwares work great on my Mac. 
Please don’t? I don’t need yet another computer to run a near-perfect DAW - Renoise. What, are 'ya trying to make me sad?
Oh, and since I began using Renoise, everything I’m doing musically is getting me places much further than I ever could with Reason. Please, please, please don’t deprecate Renoise for OS X? Heck, I’m even on an actual label because of Renoise. My attempts with Reason to make this kind of music just doesn’t fly.
stick to a OSX version that works ok? or invest 200$ for a decent laptop, which will run flawlessly renoise under any linux 