CPU load increased substantially?!?

Cubase
1

Hey guys!!

I have a very odd problem, and unforunately its a little bit on the vague side. But I’ll relate the story as I’ve experienced it…

Went to go do some work in Cubase 5.5.3 about a week and a half ago, and suddenly all my mixes that i’ve done recently are PEAKING OUT the ASIO meter and chewing up all my CPU’s power (therefore causing the whole messy, poppy, scratchy playback) And some of these projects weren’t even pushing it to the 50% mark. (I know this because I keep the system usage meter on at all times). Now, as far as I know I have made no changes to my system, and I know that I haven’t recently installed anything major. Or, anything at ALL for that matter.

I checked my task manager, nothing is wreaking any havoc that i can see. I also did a memory test, and it seems that all modules are at 100%.

To give an example of what I mean, I pulled up 2 instances of Line6 Podfarm 2. This put the CPU usage to about 50%. Before, this didn’t even make my computer flinch.

Just for my own curiosity, I called up a Protools session (M-Powered). FYI - this uses a different sound card, an M-Audio 2496. I did the same thing, pulled up 2 instances of Podfarm 2. This put the CPU usage to about 8%.

Below I have listed what I normally use for soundcard and so forth.

Has anyone any suggestions and/or experienced anything like this?

2

After I upgraded to one of the 5 versions, my ASIO driver was switched to the Generic Low Latency or DirectX driver (instead of my audio devices driver). Things were behaving strangely until I realized it was switched. Perhaps this happened to you?
HTH
J.L.

3

hmmm…

I DO seem to remember that happening, but no this is the first thing I checked when it started acting funky.

4

bump

5

Perhaps the buffer size was changed (smaller) when you did the update? Try increasing the ASIO buffer size. This will lower spikes in the ASIO performance meter.
HTH
J.L.

6

Haha… no unfortunately i checked that too.

Changing the buffer size doesn’t help performance. I wish it was that simple :slight_smile:

7

Do you use either jBridge, or VE Pro?

8

No I do not sir!

9

I think I may have found the problem.

I was reading through on some of the troubles ppl were having with ASIO, and it looks like a corrupt Prefs folder might have been the problem. I trashed my prefs (i really didn’t have many set anyways) and restarted everything. My ASIO is flying once again! At least, for now anyways…

:wink: