Advice on reducing DSP % / CPU-load?

[x42 (Robin Gareus)]

@hodger

My M2Ultra Mac Studio shows 100% in Ardour with 90+% free in the Activity Monitor.

That is realistic. Ardour doesn’t do any DSP by its own other than summing. 10% CPU load for processing 200+ tracks at 10ms buffers is believable. DSP load (time required to get data from/to soundcard in under 10ms) would be higher though.

[ccaudle (Chris)]

@GhostsonAcid

~95-100%, but only in the immediate moment I hit play.

Have you verified whether you’re processors are configured to vary clock rate with load? The description of load jumping up but then gradually decreasing sounds like it could be CPU speed ramping up from idle to higher clock rate.

[hodger]

@x42

This is very Mixbus specific (due the Mixbus routing, eventually resulting in MIxbus 8-12 being the bottlneck).

Keep in mind that almost all discussion of Mixbus DSP load is not relevant for Ardour

My experience is the same for both Ardour and MixBus. Either I’ve used very small (5) channels with heavy plugin loads, or large channel counts. I’ve not found the native MixBus DSP to have any real effect compared to plugins. The 100% indicator is common to both, as well as the symptom.

I have significant Mac capabilities not being used by Ardour or MixBus while at the same time Ardour and MixBus report 100% and cause degraded audio before attempting to use more cores.

Not complaining, simply observing and advising. Any user wishing to upgrade from a Xeon or i7 Mojave system to an M2Ultra Sequoia system may indeed discover absolutely no benefit.

h

[Ljuba]

Ou yeah, that guy, i have watched some of his videos before.
I knew right away there’s going to be ton of vocals in those sessions, cause, if you want to make vocals convincing even for a simple rock tune, you easily end up with 20-30 tracks just for that purpose alone, once you start fiddling with thirds, fifths, octaves + gang vocals etc…

[Piergi]

@GhostsonAcid

Disable plugins via automation when not in use. (-A really good idea (-imho :P) actually.)

How do you do that? AFAIK disabling (i.e. bypassing) a plugin does not change a thing in DSP load (Ardour processes also bypassed plugins).

What I do find useful is disabling the tracks I don’t need (right click on the header → toggle active).

Somebody please correct me, if it does not work that way.

[x42 (Robin Gareus)]

@Piergi

a plugin does not change a thing in DSP load (Ardour processes also bypassed plugins).

This is correct. Though it also depends on what the plugin does internally when Ardour asks the plugin to bypass itself.

In an ideal world DSP load not change, so that you can safely enable a plugin without the risk of a dropout (e.g. enabling a distortion for a guitar solo).