i cant find any information on this. please help.
audio as in sound/samples. because if thats true, that means the sound playing is using 60 percent cpu which leaves me only 40 percent for vst/vsti plugins. surely i must be missing something. could you please explain how the process works jenoki? and explain why sound alone would use that much cpu? should i use my taskbar to get an accurate reading or, if my song with vstis is using that much cpu to play audio, dos that mean my pc is gonna start stuttering when i reach 100 percent?
Renoise only takes into account the amount of CPU renoise and the vsts inside it are using.
So other programs like email, internet browser, general operating system making toast don’t count.
Usually, from my experience at least, audio software has a certain time to deliver a buffer full of audio samples (the audio buffer). Your audio routines have a certain time to fill that buffer, or you will get crackling. Now, lets say you have an audio buffer which sums up to 20ms of audio (quite big audio buffer), and your VST A takes 3ms to compute 20ms, VST B takes 5ms, and signal chains take another 6ms along the way. That sums up to 14ms of CPU time, which would result in your software displaying 70% CPU used.
I don’t know if Renoise works this way too. But usually that percentage has not much to do with the CPU percentage that is computed by your operating system, as the operating system usually takes all other running processes into account too. Renoise might not get only a very tiny piece of actual time on the CPU itself, so that there is always spare CPU time for other processes on your system (like the Webbrowser with those fancy flash animations).
so your saying that the readout is accurate? by ‘audio’ that also refers to the amount of cpu the vst instruments and fx are using? so even if renoise lists the cpu as 78 and the taskbar manager lists the cpu as 22 i should trust the renoise cpu readout? because THATS how much cpu my vst/i are really using. i noticed that when the cpu said 28 in taskbar and 78 in renoise the song played still.
i kept adding vst effects and the cpu did go any higher then 99.9 so why would that happen? i admit im using a lot of fx (9 instances of tal noisemaker 1 instance of microtonic, and on the bs, drum, ld01 and 02, ive got4 instances of camelphat, variety of sound 4 tesla pros, 4 rescue aes, 4 ferric tds, 4 boot eqs, 4 nasty vcs, 2 nasty dla on lead 1 and 2, a send reverb of valhalla room, and a baxter and density on the master.
i think i need to make some sacrifices, because i sold reason and switched to renoise (reasons effects and instruments use hardly any cpu so you can pile them on and not think twice)while my ideals are adventurous my quad q9450 with 3 gigs of ram isnt. maybe thats why im using so much cpu. i think i should probably stay away from save as plugins like synthmaker and synthedit because they use much more cpu then coded vst/i?
it just occurred to me what you guys are saying. your saying that the reason renoise shows much higher cpu is because renoise only calculates dsps like vst/i and that the taskbar is so low because it only calculates the cpu that the computer (not daw) is using?
Yes, that sums it up well!
You also have multi-core issues here…
Most processors have more than one core these days, so it depends how it works that out too.
i have a q9450 2.66/67 gigahertz. you don’t think i have multicore issues do you?
Well, you have 4 cores, so the % you’re seeing will be the top % of A CPU rather than all 4 added together.
Multicore just makes things complicated and it means your CPU measurements aren’t THAT reliable.