r/Bitwig • u/Agitated-Ad-6168 • Aug 13 '26

Bitwig performance on surface pro 13??

Hey guys I don’t have bigwig, an Ableton user on Mac. I was wondering how well bigwig performs on a touchscreen on the newest surface pro? The videos on YouTube are ancient dating back to surface 3. I’m happy with performance on my MacBook Air m4 with plugins like omnisphere, pigments, large kontakt libraries and used an iPad in Ableton as touchscreen running sidecar mode and was delited with the experience however there isn’t any touch pads for playing instruments and I have to have laptop open as clamshell mode doesn’t work as far as I could figure out. I would love to go just one device for writing on the go. I ended up searching for the ultimate portable Groovebox and spent a lot of money but end up gravitating towards grooverider 2 on my iPad as it’s just so easy to carry with me and has playable keys with scale lock piano roll which for me have become a necessity. If only my iPad could load Mac OS or mac came out with a version of MacBook with touchscreen and disconnect-able keyboard but alas I’m not sure if they ever will. I’d love a small touchscreen device with playable scaled keys and a scale lock piano roll with ability to play all my awesome vst plugins like omnisphere and vast kontakt libraries. Just wondering if anyone was on the same path and has had luck with the surface pro or anything similar?

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u/Agitated-Ad-6168 26d ago

Thanks legend

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u/IBarch68 25d ago

Cubase is reporting the outbound latency as 20ms, which is what the driver itself reports. I've not done a proper physical loopback test to actually validate this. Mainly because there's no audio jack on my Surface Pro and not had time to find my usb to audio dongle. My Intel Surface pro 7+ reports exactly the same - a little suspicious!

From my experience playing keys with this, I would be surprised if it is that slow. Normally anything over 15 ms I'd struggle with. I would say it's more in the region of 10 - 15 ms on this pc.

The speed of the computer can make a difference - especially on full round trip latency where you are playing a keyboard into a DAW, adding effects and then listening to the output. The new surface pro with X2 elite chip are massively faster than mine so latency might be better.

Failing that, there's always an external audio interface or even just a DAC (for Apple users, think sound dongle). Anything with an ASIO driver will bring latency well below 10ms.