1st CPU core overloaded, the rest at <50%

Cubase
1

I’ve worked myself into a corner.

My CPU is usage (not ASIO performance, but actual CPU performance) is pinned to max and I’m getting almost constant dropouts. I know you’re supposed to freeze tracks and render-in-place to lighten the load. But, unfortunately in this case, most of my processing was done on the instrument busses. There’s nothing to freeze. As for printing, unfortunately again, the busses I need to print are exactly the ones I’m not done working on yet.

What’s odd is that looking in Task Manager, it’s really just CPU0 Thread 0 (First CPU, first thread) that’s having the hardest time. The rest of them are at 50% usage or less. What’s also odd is that I can’t seem to bring my CPU usage down. I’ve been disabling plugins left and right and that freaking CPU meter is still tickling max. That tells me that the plugins those tracks are on are not being handled by the struggling CPU core. Okay, but that begs the questions…

Which freaking tracks are handled by which CPU threads!?

This is a large, long project with many tracks and a lot of audio. Audio processing load being handled like this, I could probably sit here rendering and freezing and Direct-Offline Processing-ing, and flipping off plugins for hours with absolutely no effect if I were unluckly enough to be doing it on tracks that aren’t being processed by the CPU core that’s stuggling.

I know you’re supposed to take steps to avoid this situation for a multitude of reasons - and I will take those steps on future mixes. But, now that I’m here, I’m actually finding it really hard to get out of it.

Any tips on hunting down the problematic tracks and plugins? Thanks!

2

is there any chance you have inadvertently deactivated Cubase Multi-Processing?

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3

Nooo, that would be bad, haha. I just have used too many plugins. I just wish I knew which ones were loading up that first CPU core/thread so I could try to mitigate it

4

Is there anything using CPU0 before you start Cubase ?
I have had some issues with mouse-keyboard suits being buggy and using up way to much cpu.
What happens if you change the CPU affinity of Cubase to not use CPU0 ?

1 Like
5

deleted my post – since @peakae already posted while I was still typing :slight_smile:

6

Bypassing ALL plugins and activate them one by one to see which ones are eating up cpu ?
On my side it often helps me to de-active the mixer onscreen, so the graphiccard does not take up too much cpu. In the worst case I would make a stereomix of all the tracks that are finished and deactive the original tracks.
Have you turned off Hyperthreading? could also help…