I've had a bit of time to play around with everything in Komplete 10. It's a good idea to get familiar with everything and decide what you want to keep, and what you don't: because... since a lot of the plugins (especially the effects) are so similar there's no value to use them all, AND I noticed Native Instruments VST plugins are perhaps [the] most slowest plugins I have ever used. Therefore, even if you install the whole Komplete 10 library, you're at risk of having plugins that are too similar to one another and consume way too much resources.
In my case the NI plugins typically take 4 seconds to load at the most on lower-end hardware; whereas everything else zips through no issue (ReFx, Image-Line's own plugins, PianoTeq, EWQL, Slate Digital, etc.. they ALL load 80% faster than Native Instruments).
I can deal with a 4 second load time each time a project launches if that's what it comes down to. But the REAL kicker is that when you have a Native Instruments plugin deselected or not opened yet, and go to bring it up to view-- it too is delayed! Absynth will take 4 seconds to load the GUI, and FM8 will take 3 seconds. This is something I've *never* seen with any plugin before. Normally you just select the plugin and it comes into view instantly without hesitation. Therefore, if you're going through a bunch of plugins and have to wait a few seconds for a plugin to come into view, it disturbs the work flow. The interface shouldn't have a delay upon launching it inside the your DAW. This is really a deal breaker and will deter me from using NI software as part of my main toolbox, but I'll remain hopeful that some day it'll be resolved.
And yes, I tried both x86 and x64, there's no difference.
While looking for more dynamic and better reverb plugins I gave RC 24 and RC 48 a shot. Since these weren't developed by NI directly, they don't suffer from the 'NI Interface Delay' as the actual NI plugins do-- but they incrementally start to consume CPU when they don't even do anything. Not a huge issue if you have eight Xeon cores and 128 GB of RAM, but again... if the plugins have such poor resource management, if you ever want to load the project on something lesser, it's going to throttle the CPU high. Problematic on a laptop, too.
And also, this is the first time I've seen inefficient plugins to this degree. I've used the Slate Digital compressors and they were perfectly fine on the CPU while providing actual variances that I could hear. The NI mastering plugins sound virtually the same: there's no reason to keep both Vari Comp and Transient Master (in my opinion). They also have limited options when it comes to something like IL's Maximus. So for the sheer fact that I can get different sonic variety and customization, I feel that Maximus and the Slate Digital plugins are way better than the NI ones. And they don't have resource problems...
This is entirely subjective and my point of view can change at any given notice, but I wasn't too impressed when I gave them a shot. Mind you, there were other plugins that I only developed appreciation for later on.
I believe variety is important and Native Instruments has fantastic products; but I'm not going to ignore the fact that their software has some very serious optimization issues. Therefore I'd recommend anyone considering to purchase their products (re: Komplete) to first try out the demos to ensure you get the performance you want.
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