@Highly-Controversial , could you provide some additional information, please?
It is obvious that there is an issue with switching plug-ins away from the ASIO Guard into the real-time path by activating the monitoring on the channels.
The general behaviour seen in the first HALion 7 video is to be expected as the plug-in and the complete channel moves back to the ASIO Guard, hence the increase in the performance meter. Whether this significant jump is to be expected or not, cannot really be answered as this is nothing that we can reproduce here.
We would like to have one of your projects that shows this behavior if possible. Also, while running the project, please create a plug-in report from within the plug-in manager in Cubase.
Moreover, a Windows system information file (.nfo) would be helpful.
You could send a pm my way.
There was also a discussion on GPUs in here. If there is more than one GPU available, usually Windows decides which GPU to use. This can be changed rather easily in Windows 11 and Cubase could be assigned to one or the other. Here is a rather lengthy description on how to do that. Perhaps this yields a positive result for one or the other. How to choose the default GPU for games or apps in Windows 11 (digitalcitizen.life)