CPU Load - Renoise

[lilith]

As here are some Renoise users I finally ask the same question here:


In the past I mainly used RENOISE native stuff. Now I want to use more plugins, but something is strange here:
I recently bought HIVE from U-he, which is (should be) very light on the CPU. Loading 10 instances in Reaper makes the DSP load increase to ~2% (shown in Cadence while using Jack). However, when I load 10 instances in Renoise I get a DSP load of ~30%!? The same I observe with other plugins basically. Does anybody know why is this the case? I always thought Renoise is very efficient. Is there such a difference in VST treatment between Renoise and Reaper?

[Jack Winter]

Well reaper is well known for it's efficiency

Joking apart, what happens if you rec arm the tracks in reaper? Part of the reason that reaper is so efficient is the fact that it preprocesses the tracks that aren't rec armed. It calculates all the audio in advance and then mixes the channels and applies the master strip fx in realtime. This leads to a more efficient use of resources, lower dsp load, etc, albeit at the cost of meters being slightly out of sync with the actual audio being processed and a slight delay between twiddling a knob and hearing the sound change.

[lilith]

I have to correct myself. I again loaded 10 instances of Hive into Reaper and now the CPU load shown in Reaper is ~12 %. Maybe yesterday I had a different preset.

The CPU load shown in Reaper doesn't change when arming the tracks, but the RT CPU increases strongly and the number shown in Cadence obviously corresponds to the RT CPU load.

10 instances of HIVE
unarmed: ~12% RT CPU load
armed: 52% RT CPU load



In Renoise: 45% RT CPU load



So, under the line Reaper seems to be far more effective

[Jack Winter]

Reaper's RT cpu is it's internal version of JACK's DSP load. Of course it gives a slightly different result as it's measured inside the graph.

[gimmeapill]

Just a wild guess as I didn't see it mentioned: did you configure the number of CPUs to be used the same in both hosts?

[lilith]

Just a wild guess as I didn't see it mentioned: did you configure the number of CPUs to be used the same in both hosts?

Yes, both use 4 CPUs.

[pdesaulniers]

I don't know much about Reaper, but I know that Renoise can run plugins in a different process (sandbox mode), which can cause plugins to run a bit slower.

You can toggle it in Preferences > Plug/Misc > Run all plugins in sandboxes. Not sure if it makes a big difference, though.

EDIT: Also, in your screenshot, it seems like all the instances of the plugin are idle. If you want lower CPU usage at idle, you might want to enable the "Auto suspend" option, in the plugin's settings. This disables the plugin when it's silent.

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