GP4 - CPU Usage intel Mac with Big Sur


I have a set up GP 4 (4.0.51) using a clean Big Sur installation on an Intel Mac with 2,6 GHz Dual-Core Intel Core i5 and only 8GB ram.

When I checked the CPU usage I discovered a mismatch between the GP4 numbers and the Mac numbers

– Low VST usage: GP reports 12 % and Mac reports 33% for GP4

– higher VST usage: GP reports 16 % and Mac reports 79 % for GP 4

Which one is the correct correct figure? Is the Mac “GP4 Overhead” due to Big Sur? Is there an option to reduce the Mac CPU usage to free up more CPU power for GP4 and the CPU hungry VSTs?

Remark: I checked the CPU usage due to some audio cracking noise. I increased the sample rates to 512 compared to the 256 used with Catalina (eg using a B-3x). The required sample rate increase may be driven by testing a more complex setup with a Global Rackspace compared to the old GP3 / Catalina set-up. Unfortunately I have no figures from my old setup.

There is no mismatch.

The value reported by Gig Performer is solely the CPU cycles used by audio processing

The activity monitor reports all CPU usage by Gig Performer and ALL the loaded plugins (including audio processing) but also GUI, graphics, timer threads and everything else running inside Gig Performer.

Ah ok - understand. Thanks for the clarification

I assume all the GP processing is done within ONE core and not only the audio processing?

The usage from the Mac activity monitor should be used to check if i run into performance problems and to think about an increase of the sample rate?

I run at 44.1k with a sample buffer size typically 256 but sometimes 128 if I have to do something really percussive.