Yesterday I’ve been toying around with using a lot of plug-ins, pushing cpu (according to gp) as high as possible without distorting sound. The test:
- Sample rate 48.000 at 64 samples
- ThrottleStop active
- Unfiltered Audios’ Triad to act like a heavy plug-in. This is no-way intended to make Triad look bad, I love Triad for the creative things you can do with it
- Tenth generation I7 cpu (6/12 cores/threads), base 2.5GHz, turbo 4.5GHz
- Focusrite Scarlett 4i4 Gen 3 interface
- Windows 11 latest patch.
Here some empirical findings (with all the usual disclaimers):
- Without ThrottleStop, stable sound is not possible with 64 samples anyway. 192 samples is my normal safe-go-to-haven
- Intels’ turbo does a good job, together with ThrottleStop. When I throw in multiple Triad-instances, the cpu-frequency goes to somewhere between 4-4.5GHz. and stays there
- Cpu in GP compared to cpu in taskmanager gives different readings, but that is explainable because GP only considers the audio-thread (for good reason)
- Somewhere between 65%-75% cpu in GP, sound becomes unstable. Taskmanager shows that one of the cores clips at 100%. Increasing the sample buffer to 192 samples helps, probably because it lowers (also) the cpu-usage
- Triad eats a lot of cpu of the audio thread, even when disconnected (hence the reason I used it for this test). I got at 70% cpu when using approximately 11 instances.
My main conclusion is that you do not have to make the base frequency the main consideration, you can take the turbo into account as well.
This are my cents 3 and 4 