The beginning of his video still makes no sense to me. Setting DP to maximum (2048 samples) instead of high (1024 samples) is still not comparable to REAPER's AFX (~ 9000 samples buffering!?). For a fair comparison, both DAWs should be tested under comparable conditions.
I understand his point that this wasn't meant to be a performance comparison between DAWs. However, the way the video starts ("I'll test 1024 samples on each DAW" and then enabling settings that effectively use a much higher buffer size in certain DAWs) is very misleading, as is the chart. And as we've seen many viewers interpreted it as a direct comparison of the actual performance of different DAWs.
Hi Lukas! James from the video here. Thank you for your feedback! Just wanted to chime in and clarify a couple of things in case others come across this. (These are all in the follow-up video in a reply above, but I totally understand not everyone wants to watch a video and/or give the video a view count.)
First, the goal of the video is about
how each DAW performs on 4 generations of Pro chips, and how that can affect purchasing decisions.
It's not about comparing the DAWs and which DAW is better.
Now, I understand that I myself made comparisons of different DAWs' performances in multiple occasions in the video, and I fully acknowledge that that was not a good move. It muddies up the actual purpose of the video. Comparison is fun, and I just got carried over looking at the test data. I will strive to improve my communication in future videos
Second, despite the fact that all the DAWs have different processing buffers despite the device buffer being the same, it doesn't change what I wanted to show, which is—
Some DAWs's CPU overload “ceiling” is (or can be configured to be) higher than others.
Yes, those DAWs use all kind of processing tricks to achieve that, but the bottom line is, for the user, it's a difference of being able to just barely play back a huge mixing session smoothly and not, on the exact same hardware.
And that's speaking from experience. On the same computer, I simply could not mix some large projects in Logic because I kept getting the system overload pop up, whereas REAPER could handle those no problem.
Like yes, REAPER is “cheating,” but that's the thing—there is no way to get S1, Logic, Ableton Live to “cheat” like REAPER, Cubase (and maybe PT). There was a post on Reddit by an S1 user (not me) asking about this exact topic:
Studio One performance - the real question
Because of this, I think it's helpful for people to know where that CPU overload “ceiling” of their DAW of choice is when buying their Mac:
- If it can be configured to be super high (e.g. REAPER, Cubase), they could choose a lesser chip, and allocate more of their budget to SSD/RAM etc.
- If not (e.g. S1, Ableton), they might want to make sure they get a more powerful chip.
Hope this makes sense!