The ASIO Guard

May I ask, the attribute of ASIO Guard related to which properties of the computer? it allways turn to red when mixing, the CPU usage rate is less than 40%. The buffer of the sound card has been set to 1024, also there’s a lot of memory left ,everything is right but it still bursts.I need to remove some plugins that are more computationally intensive.Is there a smarter solution?

ASIOGuard is an implementation of a hybrid engine in cubase, i.e. there are two audio paths, one for real time, which uses the buffer size of the ASIO driver and is active for all record or monitor enabled tracks, the other path has additional bigger buffers for preprocessing the non realtime tracks (the three ASIOGuard levels translate to different buffer sizes, roughly).
So all in all it should be considered a good thing, especially as you don’t need to switch buffer sizes as often as before , like low for recording and higher for mixing. I have my buffer size set permanently to 128 and that works fine for most situations.

The performance meter in Cubase does not equate to CPU usage, especially not to the overall average CPU usage, it displays the load for the respective section.
You can have an average CPU usage of your system of 40%, but if one core is nearly or fully saturated while the others do nothing, the load still goes into red and you’ll get dropouts.

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A thing to note when using asio guard. If you click on a vsti track the default in Cubase is for it to become record enabled. As soon as this happens it bypasses asio guard and becomes real-time and therefore the processing load shoots up. It’s so easy with the default value to keep doing this when you go through tracks. I have now disabled the auto record arming of tracks for this reason.

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I think the auto record enable is quite useful at the recording stage, but I agree, later on when mixing, you inadvertently click on a track and suddenly your peak load goes into red… not helpful :wink:

Wow, I hadn’t noticed that. Thank you for pointing it out. I will check it out next time I am in my studio.

I don’t even know that, I hav’t ever seen it on the official manual LOL,thanks

So what should be the next step? Set CPU threads?My CPU model is AMD Ryzen 9 3900XT 12-Core Processor 3.80 GHz,my memory is 64G,The sound card is id14.I think that’s enough for mixing,but… Thank you for answer

Depends. If your system is set up properly and suitable for DAW usage, there’s usually two causes for dropouts:
A) the aforementioned record enable which activates the realtime path
B) too many plugins in the project, especially too many CPU hungry on one track.

For optimizing your system, read Pete Brown’s blog:

But remember to not tweak too much at a time, do it incrementally and test after each change, with the same project, if there is a change to the positive.
Testing your system with LatencyMon could be another option, but interpreting the results are not always easy…