Reason is going DOWN HILL FAST - Zero CARE about Efficiency anymore.

[esselfortium]

I think it's a problem of REs in general — that's my personal experience so far: REs and VSTs are more CPU demanding than Reason's built-in devices. Some developers may be better or more experienced in optimizing than others, but in general that's my observation. I just tested Europa and Grain — which are pretty complex but coded directly into Reason — and even if I play lots of notes with the weirdest sounds, the CPU meter just shakes a little between one and two bars. In most REs this is normal behaviour — for just one or two notes! Even though I bought a lot of REs in the past, I tend to use stock devices now, just because I get more out of them without any headache.

Europa and Grain were developed as rack extensions, actually! Propellerhead's DSP programmers seem to just be remarkably good at figuring out where to compromise in order to create well-optimized instruments and effects that sound more CPU-intensive than they actually are.

[JoshuaPhilgarlic]

Europa and Grain were developed as rack extensions, actually! Propellerhead's DSP programmers seem to just be remarkably good at figuring out where to compromise in order to create well-optimized instruments and effects that sound more CPU-intensive than they actually are.

What do you mean with "developed as rack extensions"? Props mentioned that both are integral part of Reason like Thor, Subtractor etc. (which is obvious, 'cause no separate download is needed). Okay, it may be that the RE SDK was used for general development (looking at some GUI oddities ), but this doesn't exclude the possibility to further optimize the code when it's built into Reason itself. Props are at the core of all of this, and thus, if the code the SDK creates isn't well enough, they may have possibilities that third party developers don't have access to (just a guess). And don't forget: REs need some kind of interface to get connected to Reason (all that Audio and MIDI stuff that needs to go in and out through any kind of — whatever — channels...) which surely can be shortened if the device is hard-coded into the application itself!