Help with CPU Usage and Glitching

Hi.

I’d really value some advice - I know performance and CPU is discussed a lot and I’ve done some digging through posts, but I’m still stuck.

  1. I’m running a few different instrument and effect plugins in my rack which I disable when not in use. When I’m not playing, GP shows 60% CPU usage - how can I determine which plugins are causing high CPU usage ? Can I view audio CPU usage by plugin ?

  2. I was using Reaper and could easily run a sampled piano, bass VST and two instances of Omnisphere with multiple layered pads. I thought GP would give me at least as good performance, however I get audio glitching with one patch active on Omnisphere and not much else going on. I appreciate the architecture of a channel-based host means it can multi-thread, but the performance is maybe 10x worse under GP at a guess. Am I missing a trick here or am I just trying to use GP for a purpose it wasn’t intended ?

Feel free to point me to any useful threads or guides. I’ve read quite a few but can’t find anything that really helps. Other than perhaps some long discussions on the merits of multithreading in various scenarios. My background is IT, software design and audio so happy to get technical if I need to.

Here’s some more context :

Windows 11, 12 logical CPUs, Intel 8750H and 32GB RAM, SSD.
Piano - Hammers and Waves Grand (or Garritan CFX Lite)
Pads - Omnisphere
Main effects - a few bx_console N channel strips, once instance of an algorithmic reverb, a bit of master EQ and a limiter.

Basic keys and Omnisphere was well within the limits of Reaper but seems to bring GP to a stuttering halt.

Welcome, Andy!

Did you try to disable hyperthreading and using 6 physical cores?
Power plan something like high preformance?
What audio interface are you using, at which sample rate and latency?

1 Like

Hi @AndyW, welcome to the GP community forum :wink:

You could start with this guide:

3 Likes

You could try using Resource Monitor. This is an included program with Windows which you can find by searching for Resource Monitor and/or it’s also linked through Task Manager. Filter the results by Image - in this case Gig Performer which should provide a lot of information on it and it’s associated Handles, Modules, CPU usage etc etc. You should be able to set up some test scenarios with different plugins/libraries to help you determine what is loading up your computing resources and it’s distribution. See the screenshot below.

Hiya - thanks so much for your reply. I haven’t tried Hyperthreading. I’ll turn that off next. Power plan is definitely optimised for performance. I’m using a Behringer UMC404HD at 44100Hz and 256 samples buffer.

Amazing - thank you. I’ve had a scan through and there are a few things I can try in there. Quite a few I’ve already done but some still to do.

Interesting - thank you. I’ll give that a go. Ideally I’d like something a bit simpler so I can see what plugins are using what CPU resource. I was a bit spoilt in Reaper as it shows all the plugins listed neatly with their CPU impact.

Interestingly, my Scan 3XS audio laptop (rebadged Clevo) doesn’t have a BIOS option for disabling hyperthreading.

I’ve found one particular plugin which uses a lot of CPU even when idle. On Reaper it just put it on a separate core and all was fine. I can work around the issue in GP by not using it or tweaking the parameters to make it less CPU intensive.

In GP you can run it in a separate GP instance which often helps.

1 Like

Which plugin? It’s always useful to know about plugins that are soaking up too many cycles.

1 Like

Same for my Clevo PB51DDS laptop ( i7-10875H CPU @ 2.30GHz, 32 GB, 2x 1TB SSD, nVidia Geforce RTX 2060). I found an alternative BIOS from Schenker/XMG Germany, a company which also rebrands Clevo. There, much more BIOS options are available.

Honestly, I can’t really prove that disabling hyperthreading makes much of a difference. For applications like GP which are presently not making full use of multi-core processors unless a plug-in does (NI Kontakt for example), having more logical cores is at least of no advantage.

I can easily run Omnisphere fully loaded with complex multis in parallel with stacks of instruments in NI Kontakt without glitches in GP. RME Babyface Pro at 44.1kHz, 96 samples buffer.

1 Like

I was trying out Voxengo Teote - and Automatic Spectral Balancer. I don’t really need it as such for live use and there are options to make it less CPU intensive which I’ll try too.

Thanks - good call. I’ll see if there are any alternate BIOS options.

After disabling that and tweaking a couple of other plugins, I can get back to running Omnisphere with two or three patches active and no or minimal glitching. Feels like I’m not far away from getting where I need to be now. Cheers.

2 Likes

Within GP, you could disable the plugins one at a time and see which one is eating up CPU.