Thanks for replying…
This was my motivation for posting; I’m constantly sitting at 90-95% Average Load in most projects now. This means I’m frequently experiencing dropouts. In my case it’s particularly painful b/c it’s not just a brief dropout and then right back to work. Instead the Average Load meter ‘convulses’ between 0 and 100% for quite a long time (as much as 30 seconds). And this can happen after playing just a few seconds of a project. I’ve found that disabling (alt-clicking) a few of the CPU-hungry plugins can break the convulsive cycling. Nonetheless, I’m eager to find a way to tap into what appears to be unused CPU power to give me a little bit of headroom to avoid the scenario described above.
Actually that’s what I thought too, but as I mentioned in my initial post, my Realtime Performance is actually consistently quite low (<10%). It’s the Average Load that’s consistently (and precariously) quite high. This is confirmed by 1) the favorable results reported by LatencyMon as well as, 2) the somewhat surprisingly weak correlation between buffer size and the problems I’m describing. Even with it set at the maximum value (either 1024 or 2048), my performance does not improve. Together, all this has me thinking that it’s not so much realtime performance but rather something related to CPU power.
I neglected to mention in my original post that the balancing across cores (6 physical, 6 logical) is nearly perfect. Most of the time they’re within 10% of each other; no single core dominates or is left idle. This too seems to point to CPU power. Perhaps it’s a reduction in clock frequency due to thermal throttling (especially given that I’m using a laptop workstation; HP ZBook Studio x360 1030 G5)? In a heavy project (many VIs and FX), core temps can reach the upper 80s (even with external fan cooling).
I was afraid that this would be the case, but then I ran into this: Cubase 12 update: Threadripper 3970x build notes and benchmarks | VI-CONTROL
Scroll down to where it says:
Switch off hyperthreading: Out of the box, with hyperthreading on, Cubase’s ASIO-guard does not function properly. Turning off ASIO-guard improves performance. However, once hyperthreading is disabled in the BIOS, ASIO-guard can be turned back on and performance increases to a totally different ballgame allowing to reach CPU saturation of almost 100% without drop-outs (all 32 cores are fully loaded).
This gives me some hope that I may not be searching in vein.
Cheers…