Uvi Falcon
Arturia Pigment
French post 
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Came here to say this too. Most DAW’s synths are more than enough to make amazing music.
I wouldn’t describe myself as being “severely limited” my laptop is only 2 years old, but for whatever reason Pigments just seems to make it glitch out as soon as a patch gets in any way complicated.
It seems to be much more demanding than any other softsynth I’ve tried.
Laptop is a Ryzen 7 3700U with 8GB so it shouldn’t be total junk unless anyone can suggest to the contrary.
Surge XT and Vital are free and I would have paid money for both of them.
For paid synths I really like Phase Plant and Pigments. I’m aware there’s a lot of crossover between these, especially in the wavetable department, but they’re definitely not the same and I tend to create different sounds with each of them. For example, I like the additive stuff in Pigments, which Phase Plant doesn’t have, and in Phase Plant you have many more modulation sources and destinations – I like that you can use distortion as a generator or modulation source!
No love for Ableton synths? I don’t have a strong opinion either way, just curious why people tend not to recommend them.
Ableton Wavetable is the business. Also, although Sylenth might be ‘old’… it still rocks. It’s more down to you than the synth anyway.
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It’s a laptop so unfortunately it’s not possible.
I haven’t got Ableton
I’m a Bitwig user.
wavetable is amazing, my only wish is that they make the matrix values controllable by macros or available for automation, it would be so great!
To give a bit more context I’m somewhat a beginner and wanted to learn synthesis and not rely on presets.
Despite being a Bitwig user I’ve shyed away from Grid because I don’t know what I’m doing and will probably get lost.
I was looking for essentially a popular and powerful synth that wasn’t harnessed to being a vintage recreation, but with a relatively fixed architecture I could learn with. Pigments seemed to fit the bill but it kills my machine in the way no other VST seems to.
I’m less interested in things like Phase Plant because they are doing the same job as the Grid and so I might as well use that.
In this case I highly recommend Serum. It’s still one of the best synths around, and it’s got such a well designed UI for beginners. The signal path is implicit in the layout of the panel, and while it can be incredibly deep, it’s actually very simple on the surface. You’ll effectively grow into it.
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Here’s my favorites
Omnisphere
Diva/Zebra/Hive
Massive X
Reaktor with all it’s user files which are easily found.
Dune 3
All of these are deceptively easy to wrap your head around (Reaktor has the biggest learning curve), but also offer a lot of depth.
VCV rack could also offer a lot of depth for you as has a pretty feature packed free version.
I really love Hive and ACE.
ACE is incredibly cpu lite with modern computers, and can be tweaked to be even more efficient. Modulation on it is very quick, visible, and akin to eurorack.
Honorable mention to Massive X, though I wish mapping it to third party controllers was less burdonsome.
I’ve tried many VSTs, and decided to take the plunge and get Omnisphere and I have not looked back. It’s my end game VST 
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Isn’t it more of a Rompler sort of thing with loads of presets?
Sylenth1, although old, still sounds good and is very light on CPU. It’s not particulary flexible for today’s standards though. My favorites are Diva for VA and Vital for everything else. If I could have just 2 synths, it would be them.
I’m also saying Pigments. I have no issues with CPU unless I stack 12 voice chords on the harmonic engine with multiple voices. I’m using i7-8700 CPU @ 3.20GHz with 16gb RAM for full disclosure.
Using wavetables and analog I can generally use as many instances as I need. Maybe around 5-6 instances alongside 20-25 tracks of hits and loops.
Serum is probably good to learn on due to the massive amount of online tutorials.
That’s near enough twice as powerful as my machine 13,000 vs 7,000 on CPU mark.
mentioned already but Surge is my goto for most tasks. I also use a pretty obscure one called Atlantis (by jeremy evers) that never ceases to surprise me. i used absynth and massive heavily back in the day but not so much anymore… ableton provides the tools to make most sounds imo
not a vst; but Wren Modular is like nord modular software on crack, and is amazing for creating new and unique synthesizers and whatnot. its a lot more to take in than just learning a vst but endless possibilities (also probably a lil easier to understand than reaktor)