Cockos Incorporated Forums - View Single Post - Reaper's CPU usage Exponentially Higher Than Other DAWs?

serr · 10-12-2017, 07:27 AM

Hey that's my Mac Pro.

I haven't found a way to max this out with audio work yet. I did have a settings issue a few years ago that I solved. I was hitting the wall with a project that was over 200 tracks and just as many plugins.

Hyperthreading off (Reaper prefers to manage its own threads)
Set number of audio processing threads from 1 to 8 (the physical number of CPU cores)

I use some 3rd party plugins that it turns out are not compatible with Reaper's Anticipative fx processing feature. I disable this for any track with one of those plugins inserted. Do NOT disable AfxP globally in preferences though! Only per track for incompatible plugins.

Now there's no back wall. I can run mixes with stupid track counts and hundreds of hungry plugins. It took some screwing around to figure this out because any project smaller than that ringer that came along shows no signs of trouble even with some completely wrong settings. I was running live sound with a low buffer for < 11ms round trip latency with 36 live input channels for a couple years before correcting those settings and never had a glitch there. (FYI I run a 1024 sample block size for headroom for studio work where there's no live monitoring.)

I do understand there are a few modern MIDI instrument plugins that can bring even an 8 core i7 to its knees. I don't play with MIDI instrument stuff so I'm out of the loop for that.

What are you trying to run?

10-12-2017, 07:27 AM	#2
serr Human being with feelings Join Date: Sep 2010 Posts: 12,632	Hey that's my Mac Pro. I haven't found a way to max this out with audio work yet. I did have a settings issue a few years ago that I solved. I was hitting the wall with a project that was over 200 tracks and just as many plugins. Hyperthreading off (Reaper prefers to manage its own threads) Set number of audio processing threads from 1 to 8 (the physical number of CPU cores) I use some 3rd party plugins that it turns out are not compatible with Reaper's Anticipative fx processing feature. I disable this for any track with one of those plugins inserted. Do NOT disable AfxP globally in preferences though! Only per track for incompatible plugins. Now there's no back wall. I can run mixes with stupid track counts and hundreds of hungry plugins. It took some screwing around to figure this out because any project smaller than that ringer that came along shows no signs of trouble even with some completely wrong settings. I was running live sound with a low buffer for < 11ms round trip latency with 36 live input channels for a couple years before correcting those settings and never had a glitch there. (FYI I run a 1024 sample block size for headroom for studio work where there's no live monitoring.) I do understand there are a few modern MIDI instrument plugins that can bring even an 8 core i7 to its knees. I don't play with MIDI instrument stuff so I'm out of the loop for that. What are you trying to run?