I’m confused about the behavior of the Asio guard. I watch the performance meter and sometimes the Asio guard seems to do nothing, although it is activated. The Asio meter shows zero activity like in the screenshot. It should do his job, because the performance meter is very high and there are already some dropouts .
In other cases the Asio meter indicates an activity, but when I play the same project again, it might be that the Asio meter doesn’t show any activity.
Sometimes the performance meter in Cubase shows a very high level of resources usage, but the computer system shows a low CPU usage. How is it possible ?
ASIIO Guard/Performance Meter is (somewhat) explained here.
The performance meter doesn’t show CPU usage, it is some Cubase internal performance metrics, which probably depend on several factors.
Cubase has some know issues with projects that use many (especially stacked) groups and long plugin chains. So your system can playback maybe dozens of instrument tracks fine, gut if you route those track so several buses, put a lot of plugins on those, then also put a lot of plugins on the master bus, ASIO load can get quite high even if the overall CPU usage isn’t.
If the ASIO guard is low, but the real time/peak is high, it could mean that you have some very demanding instruments running that are all record armed.
It all depends on the project.
It all depends on the project in question.
1 Like
From the looks of the meter, are you sure you didn’t turn off ASIO Guard altogether? That’s basically what the system looks like when ASIO Guard is off.. Without it, the CPU is constantly being hammered.
No, the ASIO guard was on in this case.
There are no busses involved. I used the Steinberg plugin Flux , which is part of HalionSonic , with just one track. It maybe a very demanding plugin, but why is ASIO guard sleeping? I don’t understand, how there can be dropouts and a high ASIO load, if the system CPU usage is low.
If it was not enabled, you would not see it in the monitor panel.
If you have monitoring enabled on a track, I believe ASIO guard turns off by default. Thus the metering dropping to 0.
1 Like
exactly, if you only have one instrument track in your project, and you recored/monitor-enable it, the track gets moved from the ASIO guard path to the realtime path, leaving nothing in ASIO guard.