I have 2 PC, one on W11 built with serious components (I512600KF, 64 Gb RAM, solid Gigabyte AORUS and plenty fast SSDs) and an HP 13’ spectre laptop on w10 with an I7 8xxx and 16 Gb RAM+many SSDs.
I am using Audient audio Interfaces ID44 and ID 24 respectively, we can consider they have equivalent performance.
I use a Minilab 3 to manage Analog Lab Pro standalone on them. Nothing else running.
When using the laptop, on some preset, I have to increase the buffer size of the Audient to a very large value of 1024 to limit cracks/overrun in audio output. With same presets on the I5 12600, I also have to increase the Audient driver buffer, in a lower size than for the laptop, but in a way far larger then what I have to set for other VST3 instruments.
Could Arturia do a better optimization on Analog Lab in order to reduce this CPU usage ?
HI @csurieux
There are other things to consider besides CPU/RAM/Interface, such as USB chipset, graphics and CPU throttling.
I use a USB3 interface which is a little fussy about which chipsets it will work with, to avoid any issues i purchased a PCIe USB 4 port hub, which works flawlessly.
That’s on a desktop machine of course.
Your laptop is running off it’s own internal GPU and, unless you’ve turned it off, will be throttling its CPU to some extent or another. My own hunch is it’s likely to be the USB chipset, and/or your graphics adapter on your laptop that are causing this.
It’s worth running a tool called ‘DPC Latency Checker’ on both systems to see how they compare. you can find it Here.
HTH!
Thanks @matjones but concerning my main desktop PC I have a Gigabyte Aorus Elite mobo which implements solid USB 3, no need for extension, and from my experience USB 2 has never blocked any solid audio drivers, as Audient’s one, to manage efficiently audio.
And I use an Nvidia GPU with solid performance even if I don’t see the implication on Arturia Analog Lab pro eating my CPU…
And concerning my laptop, I set its CPU mangement to use max resources, no throtling here.
And I know from years Latency checkers.
The problem is that Analog Lab is showing poor performances related to its concurrents, as Komplete Kontrol, for example, witch is not known to be a lean CPU user.
It appears that Arturia softwares should get a real pass of optimization, even if I totally support and appreciate Arturia.
Same problem…
When I had 5-10 tracks in Cubase with Analog Lab V Pro multi-instrument presets, all of my PC cooling fans were spinning at max speed, and my CPU was around 50% usage. My CPU is from 2016, but still - I’ve never seen anything like that before.
I just opened another Cubase file to test this.
15 tracks of Analog Lab V Pro multi-instrument presets.
Around 30% CPU usage in idle state. That is, nothing is playing or making a sound. That can’t be normal?
Hi Aleque,
If all 15 tracks are multi-instruments, then thats 30 instruments plus effects. Depending on what synths are used, this could start to get heavy on older hardware.
Out of interest it would be good to understand what synths you’re using in these tracks. Some of the modern synths like Pigments are Augmented can get heavy.
Let me know
I feel your pain but that’s antique so you’re going to have to make compromises.
As Arturia improve the authenticity and complexity of their VSTS it stands to reason they get more processor intensive.
The way Arturia specifiy minimum specifications is for one instance running standalone. Not multiple instances running live in a DAW, which itself consumes resources. Audio, video and gaming are among the hardest things you can ask a computer to do in terms of processing-resource.
Seems about right considering the age of your CPU. Part of that is Cubase, plus other system overheads, plus the VSTs running in ‘ready’ mode.
You don’t ‘need’ 15 instances of Analog Lab running live. That’s a luxury you don’t have considering the age of your hardware. You need to freeze completed tracks.
Just to add to the conversation…
I’m struggling to understand why anyone would need to have that many instances of ALV running simultaneously?
I come into contact with some pretty serious people on a regular basis and none of them have that many instances running concurrently.
It’s not something i do personally either for quite a few reasons.
It’s a waste of power/energy as we can’t work on that many tracks at a time, unless of course many of them are unison.
The more plugins ‘live’ in a project, the more chance of a corrupted project, things ‘breaking’ if updates are applied during the production lifespan of that project.
If one needs to return to a project and there have been updates, as above, a plugin is no longer in production or there have been licencing issues etc meaning it’s no longer available or useable…
It’s a REALLY good idea to use the freeze function in your DAW, this is what it’s there for… i do know people who see it as some kind of ‘willy waving contest’ as to how many instances of ‘x’ they can run at the same time, but they tend to do things like that and make very little actual music, but that’s just some people i know personally.
The above issues do crop up on here, and other forums, on a fairly regular basis, so it’s a REALLY good way of working to adopt if you’re not doing it already.
I’m actually having some issues myself with a certain manufacturers’ plugins crashing my system after a windows update… BUT because i had the foresight to freeze the affected channels beforehand i don’t need to worry, i just uninstalled those plugins until the project comes to a conclusion and i have enough time to either dig deeper or do a complete system reinstall, which is also a good idea periodically…
That’s for another thread though lol…