Serum 2 - bad glitching

[Panu Pentikäinen]

Any Serum 2 users here?

Does it work OK?
I just bought it and it glitches badly. Freezed track plays fine but live input not so. I have tried to change various MIDI related settings in preferences but they do not change anything. All other synths work just fine.

[Will.]

Its working fine here. 

[Promidi]

18 hours ago, Panu Pentikäinen said:

Any Serum 2 users here?

Does it work OK?
I just bought it and it glitches badly.

I tried the trial of Serum 2 here and it glitched badly here as well.  

I put it down to my older PC - even though, UVI Falcon 3.1.1 , Latest AAS synths (including the known CPU hog, Chromophone 3), Eastwest Opus, Kontakt 7 Full, all Arturia  synths, IKM Sampletank 4.......  well you get the picture.... all work well on my old rig.

..... ok, so maybe Serum 2 is a major CPU hog.

I uninstalled Serum 2 trial.

[Panu Pentikäinen]

CPU hog or not, Serum 2 glitches if preset is complicated. Simple presets work just fine.

CPU usage is not high in Sonar's performance module nor in Windows Taskbar, though.

I was able to reduce glitching by setting Quality to 'Good' (other alternatives: 'Best', 'Ultra' if I remember correctly) and disabling smoothing (or whatever that is) but complicated presets are still glitching.

Unfortunately I already purchased it.

[Promidi]

11 minutes ago, Panu Pentikäinen said:

Unfortunately I already purchased it.

Yeah that is a bit of a bummer....

Well this is the first release of version 2.  Maybe XREF will get the memo and refine the engine....

[Panu Pentikäinen]

Other users have performance issues, too:

https://xferrecords.com/forums/general/serum-2-performance-issues

 

 

[Promidi]

5 minutes ago, Panu Pentikäinen said:

Other users have performance issues, too:

Some of those CPUs kick some serious derriere, and even they are having issues with Serum 2. 

Don't XREF have a BETA program that should have picked up these issues?

[Mark Morgon-Shaw]

Seems fine here , I've not come across any patches that cause it to glitch.

CPU use is on the higher side for sure . Some of the complex patches consume 20- 30% Engine load at 128 sample buffer playing 3 -5 notes 

( Ryzen 5950x - 16core + RME Babyface ) 

[Panu Pentikäinen]

My PC has 8 cores, 16 logical processors, running at 4.75 GHz and it's glitching.  Audio interface is RME UFX II, ASIO buffer 128-512 (same result with the largest buffer)
This is simply bad quality control from the synth manufacturer.

I tested disabling Plug-In Load Balancing - no help.

 

[Panu Pentikäinen]

"Serum 2 was built with quality in mind. Unfortunately it does have a cost. and requires a modern processor. You can set quality to Good on the global page. You can enable S1 compatibility. If you load Serum 1 presets you should see performance on par with Serum 1. We will look for further optimizations in the future however things have really been aggressively optimized, so a machine upgrade will probably be inevitable if you want to use a lot of voices."

Source: https://xferrecords.com/forums/serum/cpu-use-is-extreme-on-older-intel-processors-but-very-workable-updated-information

 

[Will.]

2 hours ago, Panu Pentikäinen said:

My PC has 8 cores, 16 logical processors, running at 4.75 GHz and it's glitching.  Audio interface is RME UFX II, ASIO buffer 128-512 (same result with the largest buffer)
This is simply bad quality control from the synth manufacturer.

I tested disabling Plug-In Load Balancing - no help.

 

Have you tried a lower sample rate with the oversampling turned off in serum and Sonar? 

[Panu Pentikäinen]

Sonar: oversampling off. My sample rate is always 48k.
Serum 2 oversampling: I have selected the 'worst' option already.

I tried to tweak some buffer settings in  Sonar preferences but they do nothing for the issue.  The synth is obviously not compatible with older Intel CPUs.