Recently got ableton live 9, CPU issue

[Volkan Topal]

Hey,
I recently switched from Macbook pro and Logic pro 9 to PC and bought Ableton live 9 Suite. Reason i switched was because my mac hadnt been powerful enough for me for quite a while (it had a duo processor only) and i already owned a PC so i thought id save some money and upgraded my sound card to ESI Juli@ and bought Live 9. However im wondering now about the cpu and the performance.. I noticed that even when running just one sylenth1 plugin, the CPU sits around 20%?? is it normal? Even worse experiences come with some sounds on Omnisphere, or ANA that boosted my CPU to 50-70% and i start hearing clicks, pops and cracks and start missing notes on playback.. and I only had ONE instance of the plugin. is this a CPU issue? or soundcard? or what can it be.. I cant use samplerate of 258 on some sounds, without hearing clicks and pops, and when i had a preset of ANA playing, while i had set over 2048 sample rate, i STILL heard serious clicks, pops and missed notes.. I dont think the soundcard is too bad is it?

Im using windows 10 with 8GB memory, and a Intel Core i5-4430 3.00Ghz quadcore processor.. I tested this with both 64 and 32bit Ableton but both gave same CPU results.
On my mac i had an i7 processor but with only 2 cores, so surely this processor is better? I have enabled the multicore use on Ableton too. Never had such high cpus with just one instance of a plugin on my mac and logic though.

So any ideas what it could be?? its quite frustrating trying to make tracks and im afraid if just one instance of certain plugins cause this much trouble, what will playing back a whole track be like..

Cheers,
Volkan

EDIT: also when im looking at my task manager CPU, its around 10% only.. and right now im playing back the track in ableton (shows im using 30-50% CPU in ableton with a single plugin playing..) and i have spotify and some sites open.. if this is any use

EDIT2.. I read up on some posts here and went to my windows powersettings and set my performance to High Performance, atleast i know set the minimum cpu usage to 100%.. now works alot better..

[tintala]

Ive had the same cpu issues for awhile with i7 core 32 gb, 4.0 ghz/ , i also set the high performance setting. So it worked for you ? I am still having issues. Also my HDOI keeps coming on even though i have 20 tracks. I had an i5 3.4 ghz that ran better with Live..

anyway just wondering if high perf. setting remedied the whole cpu spike?

[Grill Pheiss]

Same Issues here, big differences of CPU usage beetween the windows task manager and ableton's.

I have no clue what to do about it but it seems to be really there!

[Volkan Topal]

Hey,

I have yet to make a full track on Live so Im not sure how it will be with multiple tracks.. However, [/b]before[/b] i switched to high perf, my plugin 'Spire' for example was hitting around 30-40% CPU when i played it back. now its around 13%.
ANA used to hit 50-60 now its around 40-50..(more specificly, some presets of ANA). Ive read ANA can use quite alot of CPU but 40-50% CPU use still seems very high but I get no pops and cracks atleast, its a smooth play.
Also a few other instruments i couldnt even play with 258 sample rate without hearing pops, now plays smooth..

Now i dont know whats normal in the CPU meter of ableton or how it exactly works but even if im still hitting 40% with ANA, my windows task manager shows im using 15-20% CPU.

[Grill Pheiss]

yeah similar here. Having the high perf power management in windows for video or audio task is a tweak most of users do, it doesn't however really fix any issue for me.

globally speaking, yes ableton on windows shows cpu usage differently than in the windows task manager, but the whole issue becomes really problematic when using
plugins like serum (wich isn't multicore ready from what I've read?), like spire also. With those plugins in ableton in a windows environement, the cpu differences become exponential,
40 % in task manager shows like 88% in ableton, audio cracks and pops...

without those plugins the difference is present but seems more steady, like a constant 20-25 % hike

[Grill Pheiss]

this is from Xfer's forums, posted a day ago by someone having similar issues :

"I have been running Serum on my MacBook Pro (2.9GHz Dual Core Processor With 8GB of DDR3 RAM) now for a while using the Rent-To-Own plan and it has been running great with CPU only spiking at about 15% using 2 oscillators at 16 unison using all effects and 4 notes. But i recently built my own desktop computer (3.4GHz Quad Core Processor With 16 GB Of DDR4 RAM And ASIO Audio) this computer has nearly twice the power of the mac but can barely hack 8 voices of unison with 2 notes without getting CPU spikes and audio drop outs. I am new to the PC world so i dont know much about them but it should be more than capable of handling 1 instance of Serum. My task manager is telling me that its not putting any weight on my CPU but in ableton it is nearly crashing the software. Anyone else have this problem or know the solution? Thanks! "

This one asks if Serum could be the culprit but I'm starting to think the issue could be Ableton+Windows...