Time to upgrade?

[JFreak]

In other words, some of the native plugins you're using while tracking might cause this trouble. Eliminate those and you should be fine. HDX might be overkill, but try to remove the troublesome plugins (Slate, etc.) and if necessary replace with some other ones and see what happens.

[djjazzy41]

Originally Posted by brianjanthony

So on further investigation... I have my drums parallel bussed. One is the dry bus (it has one Slate VMR), another is the smashed bus (same VMR, just crushed with a limiter). When I remove the second bus, all goes back to normal ish. Meaning CPU jumps/hovers to like 30. If I activate bus 2, it gets hectic again.

Or if I put a reverb on the smashed bus, all hell breaks loose (think of it as my meager attempt at getting a large room drum feed). This is all at 64 buffer, 44k/24 bit.

So then my question would be, would increasing my cpu to the 12 core upgrades on eBay help that load? Or would HDX help the load better? I won't be ditching the Native plugins, so I know that I won't be leveraging the DSP for plugin power.

I made the jump from 2-2.4gHz processors and 32Gb of RAM to 2-3.46gHz hexacore processors and 64Gb of RAM about 3 months ago (simple upgrade I bought on ebay for my existing machine). I can tell you that there is a noticeable difference in performance across the board on that machine, regardless of the software I am running. While in ProTools, however, I am on an HDX system, so most of the heavy lifting is done on the card. I do use native VIs, and my favorite vocal, bass, and reverb plugins are all native, though. They go on every session, and I did definitely notice improvement. That means no sluggishness or CPU spikes when I have several instances of each loaded. Given that the mixer is handled by the HDX card in my system, you may or may not see the same results, but I am definitely pleased with my upgrade. It will buy me a couple more years for sure until I am ready and able to buy in to the "next" Mac Pro sometime in the next 5 years!