Extremely jumpy real-time meter (reacts to graphics)

Hey everyone. So, as the title describes, I’m suffering from the jittery real-time meter syndrome. I have been since 8, or even possibly 7.5 came out, but I’m convinced that it’s not at all normal. First of all, my system specs:

HP Envy J130ea
i7 4700MQ
12 GB RAM
Intel HD4600 integrated GFX
GeForce 740m 2GB dedicated GFX
Komplete Audio 6
Windows 10 64-bit
All patches applied

If I load a new project and, with no tracks or instruments loaded, just drag a selection rectangle I can see the real-time meter jumping to about 10-12%. The effect seems magnified in projects that have a higher CPU load, so if I’m running at 60%, selecting nothing is enough to push it all the way into the red and create a time-stretching/slow down effect in my audio. Same goes for drawing in CC curves, dragging parts, or any graphical elements in plugins refreshing/redrawing.

This can’t be right, surely? It’s got me wondering what kind of performance hit I’m taking just by Cubase itself being up on the screen and various meters moving. I read about the registry hack (GraphicsAcceleration = 0) but it hasn’t worked for me. In fact I think it was worse.

Is there something I ought to be doing in the way of system optimization to remove this bottleneck? I’ve also read some articles that indicate that Intel EIST/Speedstepping/Turbo could be to blame, so I’d be interested to see if anyone has had any positive experiences with disabling this.

Thanks in advance!

Go into your bios settings. Disable “Intel Speedstep” technology and disable “C-states”.

The above mentioned settings did wonders for my system, I use a Nvidia Gforce GTX 970 graphics card with 3 screens, always lateste drivers, and graphics accelaration not disabled.

Good luck!

Hey man! Thanks for the reply - yeah, see…there’s like, no options in my BIOS at all. Definitely none for speedstep or c-states. So I’ll either have to look into a modded BIOS (yelp) or a software solution. I’ve put this problem out to some other producer friends on Facebook and nobody is getting this behaviour.