Mainstage 2 vs. 3: CPU efficiency

[zephonic]

I have a humble 2013 MacBookAir rocking Mainstage2 and while it just about does the job, it is in fact underpowered for live use.

 

Or so I thought, until Spectrasonics recommended I try VSTLord as a host for Omnisphere.

 

Wow, with that little app I can rock Omnisphere all day long and rarely go over 30% of CPU usage, in stark contrast to Mainstage where CPU overage is fairly common.

 

Unfortunately, VSTLord's sublime efficiency comes at the cost of flexibility, as it hosts only one VI at a time, so now I wonder if Mainstage 3 has improved efficiency? Has anybody here compared it to Mainstage 2?

Thanks.

 

[Markay]

Firstly thete will be signicant difference between an AU host designed to host one AU at a time and a fully featured host designed for live gigging like MainStage. In the Winows world I wouldn't be surprised if someone claimed that Savihost used far less resources than Cantabile or Forte.

 

I upgraded my i5 8 gig of RAM machine from 10.7.4 with MS 2 to Yosemite and MS 3. The MainStage overhead, which is easily seen and charted in real time in MS 3, see the MainStage Tips and Tricks thread, is about 18% of resources, compared with c. 13% on my i7 with 16 gig of RAM also running Yosemite MS3.

 

I haven't noticed any significant difference in overhead between MS 2 and 3 but then again I was running MS 2 in 32 bit mode and MS3 in 64 bit mode so I would expect MS 3 to have better memory management of the 8 gig of RAM.

 

The only direct comparison would be between MS 2 in 64 bit mode on the same OS compared to MS 3. But given the continued added functionality built in to MS 3 I could almost guarantee that MS3 doesn't use less resources than MS 2.

[Joe Muscara]

I have both but don't use it enough to give you data.

 

Of course, it's only $30 so you could buy it and compare for yourself on your system with the plug-ins you want to use.