Is this processor utilisation normal?

I have a Thinkpad with a AMD 4750u, with Windows 11

I was having some major CPU utilisation issues a few weeks ago but an update to the GPU (and a full, and time consuming fresh install) seemed to of fixed it in Ableton but not in Renoise.

I’m just checking this is “normal”? I know Renoise multicore support maybe isn’t as efficient at Abletons.

My projects tend to grind to a halt after adding a few power hungry VSTs, which is kind of norwal… but i’m not really going overboard here and adding huge stacks.

This is the first time that during rendering the util meter just stayed in 99% the whole way and rendered it very slowly, I opened up task manager and everything seems to be running ok with lots of spare resources… so i’m just wondering if anyone has any thoughts on this?

Renoise CPU meter shows the most stressed core, audio doesnt like being multicored rather each audio thread is processed in a linear fashion and threads assigned per core. As even one core failing will introduce crackling and drop outs, so the CPU meter shows when a single thread is about to be overloaded. One very heavy track can cause the spike, rather than a lot of tracks of moderate intensity. If some of your plugins have different quality settings for live vs render quality adjust those to taste. Reduce anti-alias oversampling if possible as this is a VERY intense CPU operation. Adjust power settings to force performance all the time.

As BriocheBaps said. This is usually the biggest problem. The more aggressive the CPU throttling (power saving) settings are, the harder it is for real-time (audio) applications to use all available processor power in time.

So setting the energy saving plan to “performance” first.

Thanks, I have got it on performance mode with no issues, have been long time windows user so i’m pretty aware of these things.

I think it’s most likely something to do with the AMD processor tbh… i’m so sure that when i first got this computer it was just flying through projects with no issue but firmware updates seem to of degraded the performance in Renoise for some reasdon. It’s possible there is an AMD performance throttle that I am not seeing somewhere…

I have decided to move to an i9 desktop CPU instead, the AMD stuff was a cool leap forward but whatever is happening is just too tricky to troubleshoot