Groove Agent overloading Cubase?

[kritikon]

Got a project on the go, and for some odd reason it started cutting out - regularly, despite not really adding much to it recently. Checked out the performance meter thingy and it was showing load of 25-30% even idling, BUT regular "real-time peak" spikes at 100% cyclic - every few seconds. Obviously something was using huge resources so I went through everything methodically, turned off all master out plugins etc, even bypassed all the in-song FX one by one - some reduced the load but not by much and didn't cause the spikes. Finally got to Groove Agent. Now, I'd used Groove Agent with quite a few internal FX - reverb/convolution, but had since gone through and muted/unloaded them once I'd programmed and then rendered most of the drums. Thought I'd bypassed pretty well anything inside Groove Agent and had it there just in case I wanted to go back and redo drums at some point (and recently it hadn't overloaded my project at all, since today).

So anyway - I deleted the Groove Agent channel and of course the overloads stopped - no spikes and the overall load reduced down to under 10% or so most of the time. Is Groove Agent supposed to do this? Yet it didn't do it until today. Or is it likely me doing something stupid within Groove Agent and having FX running in the background or something? Is it known as a CPU hog? I have quite a few synth VSTi running and they seem to use relatively little power but Groove Agent really blew the track out of the water.

[macmuse]

I can only speak for myself but I've never noticed any spikes or issues with Groove Agent in any of my DAWs.

[antic604]

Got a project on the go...

Do you mean you're running it on a laptop?

If it's Windows machine, is it in high-performance mode?

If it's not, some plugins that generate high demand for CPU performance in short bursts - a drum machine would do that - might cause problems. If laptop is not in high-performance mode it will try to keep the CPU clock as low as possible and it won't go high fast enough to process that sudden peak demand, thus causing an overrun. Also I'd be surprised if Groove Agent was spreading its CPU load accross multiple CPU cores in parallel (for separate pads), which would help alleviate the problem to some extent at least - so if you have say a kick, snare and hihat playing at the same time they'll all be allocated to single CPU thread, so that peak performance demand gets even higher.

[kritikon]

Aha. Thanks antic604. I knew good ol' KvR might have some sensible ideas.

Laptop - yes
Windows - yes
High performance mode - no (didn't even know it existed )

That might explain an awful lot. I shall go perform some tweaks on my laptop. What you said sounds about exactly right to me. It's odd in that it didn't do it regularly, but I may have diddled around with the drums and forgot I'd done it, and I guess CPU load varies with anything else I run too. TBH I didn't realise drum VSTi worked that way. This is the first time with the new laptop that I've done anything drum VSTi intensive, so I guess I live and learn...thanks.

[kritikon]

Actually, I just went over to the Steinberg.net site and read their threads on optimizing for Cubase and followed most of it (apart from dicking around in the BIOS - that's a surefire way of me breaking it). Dunno why I never did this for the new laptop - I tweaked loads of stuff on the old music desktop. I guess I just assumed the laptop would work OK for music as is. Silly, I know...

[antic604]

Aha. Thanks antic604. I knew good ol' KvR might have some sensible ideas.

Laptop - yes
Windows - yes
High performance mode - no (didn't even know it existed )

That might explain an awful lot. I shall go perform some tweaks on my laptop. What you said sounds about exactly right to me. It's odd in that it didn't do it regularly, but I may have diddled around with the drums and forgot I'd done it, and I guess CPU load varies with anything else I run too. TBH I didn't realise drum VSTi worked that way. This is the first time with the new laptop that I've done anything drum VSTi intensive, so I guess I live and learn...thanks.

So, does it work fine now? High performance mode is just left-clicking on Windows' battery icon in bottom left of the screen and moving the slider all the way to the right. Also in Cubase itself you should experiment with ASIO Guard settings (I believe they're somewhere in Studio menu), but you probably already got there from Steinberg's performance tips

[EnGee]

Cubase is already comes with special profile for power management and it's enabled by default.

Groove Agent is consuming more cpu power than Addictive Drums, like two times more! So, it's not low cpu user.

What to do in the BIOS? Disabling hyperthread? Do you have Intel?

[kritikon]

So, does it work fine now? High performance mode is just left-clicking on Windows' battery icon in bottom left of the screen and moving the slider all the way to the right. Also in Cubase itself you should experiment with ASIO Guard settings (I believe they're somewhere in Studio menu), but you probably already got there from Steinberg's performance tips

Yeah it works now. Strangely the cyclical peaks disappeared after I got rid of Groove Agent but then came back again on a later session (haven't figured out what's triggering it now). But now it doesn't drop out and plays seamlessly with the high performance mode and I tweaked a few other power settings. I haven't checked out the ASIO Guard thing yet, but yeah, I read it on Steinberg so will have a look today.

[kritikon]

Cubase is already comes with special profile for power management and it's enabled by default.

Groove Agent is consuming more cpu power than Addictive Drums, like two times more! So, it's not low cpu user.

What to do in the BIOS? Disabling hyperthread? Do you have Intel?

OK, good to see someone else having high CPU use from Groove Agent. As for BIOS - yeah I'm on Intel but I'm no programmer so I'm not going near the BIOS, isn't the BIOs where you go to fatally break things if you don't know what you're doing? Wouldn't have a clue how to do that.

[EnGee]

What processor do you have?

I can't say it uses high cpu really! Anyway, I'm using GA now in a current project and I don't have a problem with its performance, however, I use 44.1kHz sample rate and 128 buffer size, so it is a relaxing setup. I also don't use (or planning to use) many tracks. Although, I don't think I would have problems even if I want to use many tracks!

See below the performance of GA together with one instance of Zebra, Massive and Absynth5 (two tracks for external synths don't use any cpu). Also, here is my audio setup. I actually disabled the "turbo" in the BIOS because it triggers the fans of the CPU and it makes it noisy! So, I lost noticeable performance, but even with that, the Ryzen 5800x is a beast!

[kritikon]

Processor is Intel i7-8550U

My latency is set higher than yours - around 20ms in/out from memory. ASIO Guard latency is much the same.
Although I run it at 48kHz (might drop that back down to 44.1 - TBH I dunno why I set it up at 48? Always used to be happy with 44.1)

I just checked and my Steinberg Audio Power Scheme wasn't checked either - now done that.

It seems the load is considerably less - now no peaks. I since added a couple more VSTi and FX and it's still only 30-40%. Obviously the tweaks helped very much. I might fiddle around with the latency too - I should be able to get lower latency than what I have - my laptop is nothing amazing but it's a reasonable one nevertheless.

Actually - I just noticed my processing precision is set to 32 bit not 64. Does 64 increase the CPU load?

[EnGee]

A little bit, but 64bit is preferable. Experience with it and with other factor till you reach a reasonable performance. Your processor is good enough to make music but you can't compare it to a desktop with late mid/high end Intel or AMD processors, so expectations should be reasonable