Is there any reason why the ASIO-Guard Meter spikes when selecting the Arranger Track? Nothing is playing.
Always wondered why the audio performance meter shows high usage sometimes, then normal usage at other times, when playing the same track.
I probably selected other Tracks when playing back, and thought the performance was doing Okay, and then other times just left the Arranger Track selected, and get high performance usage.
It is curious indeed, especially with nothing playing.
Martin talked in other posts about Cubase “switching modes” between realtime calculations and some pre-processed calculations, or something like that.
He said it’s worth trying disabling the Cubase ASIO-Guard in Setup, see if that improves things. Try it.
Many people have very stable systems with great performance.
But quite a few seem to have some issues with performance and stability.
I’d love for a few serious optimisations in a much anticipated .30 update, performance + workflow.
I did try disabling the ASIO-Guard…Playback was really laggy. I would have thought the Arranger Track didn’t have no influence with the audio performance meter,… it’s just there so I know where the Intro, Verse, Chorus etc…are.
At least I know now, not to select it when playing back anything.
Thanks for the suggestion though 
It’s rather a simple concept.
When a track, that incorporates an audio channel, is record enabled or monitoring its input bus all the VST stuff (volume, pan, plugins, channel strip) has to be calculated in real time.
Any other track, however, is just in playback mode, whatever the track is going to play back is already predefined in the project. That allows Cubase to use a little trick and pre-calculate the audio of these tracks by a few dozends milliseconds in advance. That’s the ASIO Guard.
In the example of the video Trevor switches from a midi track to the arranger track. Now, while the midi track does not have an audio channel I am certain it is routed to a VST instrument (rack or track). I guess it gets record enabled upon selection so that Cubase puts the audio channel of the VSTi into real time mode. Thus you see both the Real Time and the Peak meter with some load. ASIO Guard is for all the other tracks in this moment.
When switching to the arranger track there is no more audio channel in real time mode (an arranger track does not have an audio channel) and thus all tracks run through ASIO Guard.