For all the time I’ve been using GP I’ve always been keeping an eye on the CPU Meter as I tend to run it alongside Ableton and so want to make sure there is enough horsepower to run both. Generally keeping it to around/under 50% and all has been great.
I just happened to have activity monitor open today whilst having a play around today and noticed that whilst GPs CPU Meter was showing 40-50%, Activity Monitor was showing the CPU only using around 10% for ‘user’ and was sat with about 85% idle!
So - what is the CPU Meter in GP actually showing as a percentage of howuch processing power it is using? Not complaining it’s inaccurate but it’s clearly not showing the actual amount of CPU load it is taking up (I don’t think?) so want to make sure I am using it effectively and not throttling my rack spaces unnecessarily.
The CPU meter is showing the amount of CPU used for audio processing only. If you move your mouse over the CPU text you will note the popup that explains it.
While the display in Activity Monitor or Task Manager will display the entire application CPU usage, it will also use the entire CPU architecture in account (number of cores for example). So this display may go from 0-100% taking all cores into count or it may go from 0-400% for example (on a 4 core system)
Depending on your plugins - some may offload processing to different cores as well, but what you really care about is this CPU meter is GP which will tell you how much “headroom” you have when processing audio.
Keeping this below 50% or even 40% is prudent. I try to keep mine below 30% actually just because I don’t like my computers running hot for hours. Then when an occasional “spike” comes up from a plugin - you will never hear any pops or crackles.
Perfect, thanks! That all makes sense now. Yeah I try and keep around 30% generally but have some situations where I have quite a few and for those try and keep under 50 at most.
(And hadn’t thought about the tooltip, that would have been a good place to start…)