CPU tip for Cubase users on PC.
 

Close your plugin windows!

My usual work flow is to have plug ins on everything and open all the time around my Cubase workspace. That's so I can get to them quicker.

Anyway, while chugging away on a track I was at the 80% to 90% CPU limit which my PC lets me get away with but the Virus TI was complaining alot, hung notes, clicks etc. So I decided to close all plug in windows bar the Virus Control and main mixer. Now the exact same song was purring at 50% to 70% and the Virus said thanks buddy and behaved a bit nicer.

Graphical overheads, CPU load, are now competing with your TI. Remember its USB 1 (the poor cousin of firewire).

On a side note, do any PC users here get a mega graphics card when setting a Music PC? I normally by the cheapest AGP card. I don't know if that will alow me to do more without upping the CPU work that Cubase seems to need to do.

Cant say that closing plugin windows, seq windows or mixer windows makes any diff to cpu useage on my machine when the TI is in use at any latency.

Thankfully its always <10% cpu even at 64 samples (1.5ms) even with 16 parts pumping away.

Btw, using a Matrox P650 128 pci-express card which has extremely good 2d output over dvi. Its total shite for 3d but spanning dual lcds both at 1920x1200 in cubase its the bollocks.

ten

I remember having the same CPU improvement on a P4 laptop. Basically the smaller the Cubase window the more CPU i got, back then I was working with a virtually bigger display ie native was 1400x1024 and my desktop was something stupid like 2000x1500 or something wacky. I couldn't work out why I was getting sucky plugin counts.

So now I have Athlon 64 so I bassically pin it down to Cubase and pixel count. Wierd.

How much RAM you got, grs?

1GB of corsair.

on my P4 it was 750MB

I might be the brand of gfx card. The P4 had a ATI Radeon 7000 and my Athlon 64 has ATI Radeon 9200. Dont know if it might be worth disabling 'write combining' under hardware accelleration page in ATI settings, therefore giving it less hogging rights. I'll try it some time soon and post here.

Here is a result of a quick test.

All plugin windows open
Song playing 100%
Song Stopped 57%

All plugin windows closed
song playing 74%
song stopped 49%

21 plugins (inc 8 vst instruments)

I just looped the chorus of a Cubase project, then opened every plugin window. Vst plugin interfaces suck MY cpu, can anyone else test this?

interesting results. thanks for the tip.

'write combining' under hardware accelleration page in ATI settings.
Did not change or influence the CPU with Cubase plugin test.

It might be a good idea if you set-up a few different Workspaces and configured them with hot-keys. You could flip between whichever windows you needed, it helps a lot with workflow.

Dave.