Pro Tools 2021.6, HD Native - will GPU increase speed/reduce lag?

[WAD]

Since updating to Big Sur and Pro Tools 2021.6, I've felt a noticeable visual lag & also occasional errors on the screen - where a track appears as a solid black bar across the screen, for example. Another issue is with certain plugins being REALLY laggy, bordering on unusable in the BX_SSL channel strip's case!

I have a trashcan mac pro, and am aware that internal GPU on it is pretty old now - mine is the D300.

I'm thinking of investing in an external GPU to hopefully resolve these issues and get Pro Tools feeling speedy again. More specifically, the BlackMagic 8GB AMD Radeon Pro 580

Does anyone have any experience with this, and will this solution resolve my issue?

Thanks!

[philipmoroz]

I am sadly having the same issue - moving around the edit and mix windows is laggy and cumbersome. I updated from Catalina to Big Sur yesterday and am running 2021.6.0.

As a test I created a blank session and created 200 blank mono audio tracks then globally increased and decreased the track height. It lags for around 0.5-1 second with each incremental height change. Also scrolling up and down the session is laggy and jumpy.

Hoping for a fix for this also. I am on a 2020 Mac Mini i7 64GB RAM.

If you discover a fix please let me know!

[JFreak]

Hi guys, welcome to the community.

Is there a specific reason why you want to be using Big Sur? I also have the trashcan (D500 graphics) and decided to stay on Catalina as it is way better supported and snappier than BS. Also the new Apple Silicon is not natively supported so there is no real reason to plan a hardware upgrade at this time. So unless something forces you to use BS my suggestion would be doing a clean install of latest Catalina and stay there until Apple Silicon is ready and fully supported.

[philipmoroz]

Good news! I've reverted from 2021.6.0 to 2021.3.1 just now and the GUI is operating noticeably smoother. It's not totally fluid but definitely better.

Hopefully this helps to bridge the gap until Avid gets this fixed.