I’ve been using Liberation for some time and been loving it so far. However, I do notice that performance isn’t great on my machine ( I7 7700K and Vega 64 ) which granted, they’re not last gen and quite aged at this point, but should be more than enough, right? I’ve run large Beyond and LSG projects with no major issues as well as Blender, and AAA UE5 projects, so perhaps is a windows/driver/other?
I removed all unused projectors ( I’m outputting to one ), windows, tried a smaller viewport, re-installed, used a clean Windows 11 install, but no matter what I try, I have the same issue.
I also created a new empty project from scratch and added a single clip with no timeline ( Circle→dotter→color ) and I’m down to 47fps.
Additionally I noticed that the Idle use (even in the background without displaying anything) is 26%, so perhaps there’s something going on?
I am finding Liberation is quite a resource intensive program (especially when using the visualiser). I am running the latest MacBook M4 Air with 16Gb RAM and sometimes it heats the processor so much it is borderline uncomfortable to have on your lap.
I also find 90% of the time it will not close without force quitting. This has seemed to have got worse since the MacOS 26 Tahoe update but it still would not quit properly 60% of the time before.
Is there anything I can do, or trim in the settings to make it run more efficiently?
Your system is getting on a bit now (around 8 years old I think?), but it should still be more than capable of running Liberation with a single laser.
A couple of points:
Framerate - Ideally you should aim for around 50-60fps but output only really suffers if you drop below 30fps. So your 57fps should be fine.
CPU usage - Liberation will always use as much CPU as it can to hit the highest framerate, (although it will reduce down to 30fps when idle). That’s different to older software which mostly shovels pre-calculated, data-heavy point streams out to the lasers. Liberation’s real-time rendering uses more CPU, but much less disk I/O and memory (And that’s why it’s only a ~30Mb download including all the content!)
Idle load – Because it’s an OpenGL app, the graphics context is still running in the background even when nothing is displayed. I’d like to add more caching and optimisation in the future, but at the moment it’s lower priority than core features.
Windows tuning – Windows GPU settings can be bewildering and inconsistent at the best of times . It’s possible there’s a hidden setting that’s holding back performance. From my quick research I’ve seen suggestions to try experimenting with things like vsync, the frame limiter, and “optimise for compute” in the Radeon panel. Let me know if you find something that makes a difference!
So in short: what you’re seeing isn’t unusual, and your system should still be fine for smooth single-laser output.
You probably know that MacBook Airs rely on passive heat sinking to cool down. They’re great machines, but will sink the heat into your lap on CPU intense apps, sorry!
I will be looking at idle performance in future, but as I said it’s not really a priority compared to other core features.
Re the quit issue - you’re right, on macOS Tahoe there seems to be a regression where some graphics-heavy apps don’t exit cleanly. Liberation already had occasional trouble quitting before, but this update seems to have made it worse. I’ll keep looking into a proper fix for this.
(I am also looking at a full re-write of the core network communication code - a huge task but should help with locking network calls)
So while there isn’t much to “tune” right now, what you’re seeing is pretty normal behaviour. Your M4 Air should still be very capable of running shows reliably – but you might need to put it on a desk
vsync has done really weird things for me when I was on windows (not talking about liberation), definitely something to experiment with to solve these issues
. It’s possible there’s a hidden setting that’s holding back performance. From my quick research I’ve seen suggestions to try experimenting with things like vsync, the frame limiter, and “optimise for compute” in the Radeon panel. Let me know if you find something that makes a difference!