To clarify this, I have updated my post and included two images showing the Performance Meter.
I appreciate you bringing that up!
I’m very curious to see if this will happen in macOS as well. Thanks!
@rickpaul
Huge thanks for your response!
After reading your previous post, I noticed it shares a lot of similarities with this one.
I’ve had the same experience with the two images you shared, showing CPU usage in Windows Task Manager before and after adding Halion (Or, in my case, any VST instrument with Record Enable activated.).
I believe you’re correct. I’ve updated my post to include two images that show a significant reduction in ASIO Guard level after enabling Record on the VST instrument track. I suspect this might be related to modern CPU architecture, but I’m very curious to see how other operating systems and CPUs behave in this scenario.
Interesting. One thing I noticed in my test of yesterday was that, when I didn’t have the HALion track there, my Cubase CPU meters were basically doing nothing – i.e. they apparently couldn’t keep up, perhaps due to too much power being claimed by other parts of the program with higher priority (like trying to keep supplying the audio engine with samples)? Thus, at least in that case, I couldn’t make a comparison of behavior with and without the HALion trick. Of course, the Task Manager CPU graphs more or less told the story of how Cubase’s behavior in the two scenarios affected CPU distribution.
My one speculation would be that, when Cubase doesn’t have to worry about the real-time thread, thus assumedly being able to give its all to the ASIO Guard thread (plus stuff like updating the user interface and whatever else needs to go alongside all that) that it somehow slices tasks up into longer segments, and maybe those take too long in extreme cases, thus not being able to get back to the audio interface driver to feed it sample buffers quickly enough. But maybe when the real time thread has to take priority, that forces it to slice things up more finely, reducing the chance of taking too long to feed the audio driver sample buffers. Or maybe the audio driver somehow gets deprioritized in this scenario, making it not be ready when Cubase is???
Whatever is going on, though, it would sure be nice if Steinberg could figure out why this weird (as in contrary to what would be expected) phenomenon occurs then find a way to take advantage of it to make performance smoother without having to add an artificial real time thread just to get better audio streaming results in these high CPU load mixing scenarios.
The thing is, I’m not sure that my i7 5820k at 3.3 GHz, which was released in 2014, would qualify as “modern CPU architecture”. And, since your much newer processor would, the behavior seems to be consistent across CPU generations, not to mention in Windows 10 and Windows 11. It will be interesting to see if the person who mentioned trying it on a Mac also sees a similar thing. If they do, then that would seem to further underscore that it is more a Cubase behavior than a CPU or OS behavior (or alternately, that they should at least be able to rely on a decade plus of CPU and OS behaviors and, potentially, deliver Cubase behavior that takes advantage of this to deliver better audio streaming results).
You can see that with record enabled, asio guard usage drops, real time goes up, and peak goes up considerably.
This shows, as Martin says, that some processing is swapped to real time mode
Why your machine overloads with asio guard is beyond my pay grade. There are various options for asio guard that you can play around with.
Hi,
I Just stumbled across this thread, in a desperate attempt to understand why my fairly recently purchased PC, is chugging along so poorly, as I’m trying to finish a long overdue project…
Current Spec:
Cubase Pro 14
Processor: I3th Gen Intel(R) Core™ i7-13700 2.10 GHz
RAM: 16.0 GB
Operating System: Windows 11 (Home)
I honestly couldn’t believe the result…
I went from a maxed out asio guard, with the other two meters barely even registering… to three meters predominately breathing in tandem.
I’ve gone from not even being able to playback the song, to being able to utilize many UAD plugins and set others to oversampling (see screenshot below)
I’m not technically minded, but agree that whatever this is doing, would be a welcome addition as a setting in Cubase…
Many thanks for this! 
Hi, thanks so much for sharing your results! One of the big reasons we have these discussions is to help each other out, so it’s awesome to hear that this worked for you too.