CPU Spikes on ONE Core

Nuendo
1

Hello all -

Preface: I’m on Windows 10 Pro with an Intel i9 10 Core, and yes multi-processing is enabled.

I’ve noticed a weird trend recently that I guess I haven’t noticed before, and that’s that certain tasks within Nuendo seem to load down one of my cores WAY more than the others. During normal production or mixing, my cores are fairly evenly distributed, and I have found that keeping them evenly distributed heavily reduces any CPU spiking. But certain tasks like opening a plugin, or copying a plugin to a different track, or even saving will HEAVILY spike Core 08 (which is really like core 9 because core 0 is a thing). Oddly…in another session, doing these same tasks spiked CPU4.

It would seem that the best way to handle virtually any task on multi processing would be to evenly distribute that task. I mean it’s kind of crazy that I’ve got an intel i9 10 core and loading a single CPU intensive plugin can bring the program to its knees IF it happens to be loading down a single core, but yet I can mix 200 track sessions with ease.

Is this a fault of Nuendo, the plugin developers, Windows, Intel, or my configuration? I can’t seem to find any info about this.

2

Last I checked there’s some sort of logic behind how the load you introduce is balanced. Last I tried it there was definitely a difference between running things in series versus parallel. So a long plugin chain is worse for one core than several tracks in parallel. And if you think about it there probably are limited ways of getting around it. In some cases one calculation has to finish before the next can take that result and do the next.

I do think though that some plugins are coded to use multiple threads, so I don’t think this is all up to Nuendo.

You can probably find some DSP software engineers on Gearspace.com who talk about it… or maybe on a different forum.

1 Like
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Good day @kendalosborne ,
With Active Multi Processing enabled, hyperthreading must be disabled, is that case?