wasi...

I've done some of my own tests with Recabinet 3.1 in Cubase 6.5 vs. Kuassa Creme and Guitar Rig 4 Pro. To make the comparison fair, I load two instances of Creme with different IRs loaded to compare to one instance of Recabinet 3.1 (which intrinsically loads two IRs at once.) I also instantiated Guitar Rig 4 with two instances of Control Room loading different 4x12 IRs.

At 64 samples/buffer (to put a visible load on the CPU) on my 2.4 GHz 8 core Mac Pro, all 3 plugins had exactly the same CPU usage (around 15%.) Our other users are also reporting very low, competitive CPU usage from 3.1, so I'm very surprised to hear of your results (still significantly higher CPU than it should be.)

Kazrog

Thanks for taking the time for that. I see you're on a mac though and I'm on Windows7. Looking at the history of Recabinet 3, the mac version was always more CPU efficient. If it's 25% more efficient than the windows version, there's the difference. I'm at 256 samples and 96kHz, for what it's worth.

I also wasn't using GR 4 but 5 and didn't load two instances of control room, but one instance of control room pro with different cabinets. I don't know how Control Room Pro functions internally, so I don't know how fair that comparison is. The other test was two parallel instances of Meldaproduction Multiband Convolution with Recabinet IRs. That was an 8% CPU load. To get up to where Recabinet 3.1 is I have to load five in parallel. I'm not sure how fair the comparison is to MMultiband because they go in and out in stereo for every instance.

Are you sure Amplifikation Creme only loads one IR per instance even if you select two different speakers? I was under the impression that the cab sim setup was like a poor man's recabinet: Two cab IRs per instance (but only three cabs to choose from).

Anyway, I'm pretty happy with 20% in 32bit, but I'd be extatic with 10-15%, that's all.

Part of the reason the audio engine was rewritten was because of the disparity between Mac OS X and Windows performance on the same hardware. Now, in Recabinet 3.1, the performance under both operating systems on the same hardware in the same DAW is identical.

I would have run my test in Windows 7 64 bit, but I don't have all the same plugins installed on that partition, so it was easier to do a quick test under Mac OS X. However, I'm positive that the performance issue you're having has nothing to do with what OS you're running...

Running your DAW at 96 kHZ and a low latency samples/buffer setting is VERY demanding on CPU resources. It's quite possible (I'm speculating) that other IR loaders begin to significantly truncate IRs at these resolutions (or compromise algorithmic accuracy), whereas Recabinet 3.1 doesn't compromise quality at any resolution. I say this because the other plugins perform the same as ours in typical sample rates like 44.1 and 48 kHZ.

Even on my 8 core Xeon CPU, running convolution at 96 kHZ and low latency is a tall order. Is there any reason why you are tracking at this resolution? Especially in Ableton Live - you're shooting yourself in the foot, because that DAW's audio engine internally compromises audio quality for the sake of live performance oriented stability (by their own admission) so all you're doing is eating up extra CPU cycles, and not getting the quality you would otherwise have at 96 kHZ.

I recommend working at 48 kHZ - audiophile quality and excellent CPU performance in any DAW.

My interface seemed to run smoothest at 96, oddly enough.

But you're right, if I set it at 48khz it cuts CPU usage more than in half for Recabinet (8%) while the meldoproduction convolver only improves a little bit (6%).

Consider it solved, thanks for your help!