I'm using UHE ACE with a demo of Aether reverb on a new iMac running cubase 7 with a Focusrite audio interface. The CPU meter is red-lining in the daw and I'm hearing dropping and clicking in the audio, but on the activity monitor in OSX my CPU usage is only around 20%! Something must be causing a bottleneck it seems. I'm pretty sure everything is optimized in the plugin and the daw...I have every multicore box checked and everything is 64bit. If I can't get an answer here I'll have to deal with Steinberg.
Any tips??
Thanks!
CPU meter maxed in cubase 7 but only 20% in activity monitor?
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- KVRAF
- 7894 posts since 12 Feb, 2006 from Helsinki, Finland
Well, yeah might not be the best forum but mods will move it for you if they think it's worth the trouble.
Anyway, in general hosts usually measure worst-case real-time performance (essentially the percentage of a playback buffer length that is spent on processing the next one) while operating systems typically measure average CPU utilization, which is always a significantly lower number (but also a significantly less useful number; the host meter predicts when drop-outs will start happening, while the CPU utilization meter is useless for this purpose.. also remember that even on a single-core you can usually only go up to around 70% utilization [well, without using very long latencies; but 70-80% or something is a good rule of thumb] without risking at least theoretical drop-outs).
While 20% CPU utilization might indicate that the multi-core utilization is not terribly high, if you are maxing out with a few voices of a single plugin, then it's entirely possible that no further parallel processing is possible. The reverb processing time will also add additively on top of the synth as there is a serial depedency (one needs to be finished before the other can even start).
Anyway, in general hosts usually measure worst-case real-time performance (essentially the percentage of a playback buffer length that is spent on processing the next one) while operating systems typically measure average CPU utilization, which is always a significantly lower number (but also a significantly less useful number; the host meter predicts when drop-outs will start happening, while the CPU utilization meter is useless for this purpose.. also remember that even on a single-core you can usually only go up to around 70% utilization [well, without using very long latencies; but 70-80% or something is a good rule of thumb] without risking at least theoretical drop-outs).
While 20% CPU utilization might indicate that the multi-core utilization is not terribly high, if you are maxing out with a few voices of a single plugin, then it's entirely possible that no further parallel processing is possible. The reverb processing time will also add additively on top of the synth as there is a serial depedency (one needs to be finished before the other can even start).
Last edited by mystran on Fri Apr 25, 2014 12:10 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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- Beware the Quoth
- 33177 posts since 4 Sep, 2001 from R'lyeh Oceanic Amusement Park and Funfair
What are your latency settings. Have you tried increasing them to see if that makes a difference?
my other modular synth is a bugbrand
