PLEASE HELP! plug ins & cpu usage?

See my post above (or below) about my similar dilemma. Waves are fantastic plug-ins, but CPU hogs. In the RTAS game, all processing is done via the CPU, not taking into account RAM or the speed of your hard drives at all. Do the math with me...466 (or 400, in my case) vs. 867. Which do you think will accommodate more plug-ins? I need some Mylanta and a load of freelance! [ August 01, 2001: Message edited by: RobbaDobba ]

Cane>> Neither ProTools nor any plug-ins are altivec enabled. Altivec is by far the most significant advantage a G4 has over a G3, but if the programs do not support it, it's running at virtually the same speed as a same-clock G3. So essentially I can use as many plugs as you can with my 500MHz B&W G3. As I've said many a time before in this forum, G4's are great computers, but still very much unimplemented technology, especially when it comes to audio. Until ProTools is 'carbonized' to support OS X (aka hell freezing over) you should either go with the fastest single-cpu G4 (867MHz at present) or a 500MHz G3 and blow the savings on outboard gear, such as a reverb unit which will free up more CPU than the equivalent money could buy. Don't feel too bad, you've still got a good Mac with great relase value. You should consider yourself lucky you didn't get a dual 533MHz G4, which only edges out my G3 in ProTools.

Hi Cane! I work on a Windows, but I know Renaissance Reverb is one of the baddest CPU hogs out there. The only remedies so far are to get a faster processor or use R-Verb in Audiosuite.

Hmm...And the Renverb, IMHO, doesn't even sound that great. Trueverb, again IMHO, is however pretty nice sounding for small to medium small room emulations. Z

You didn't tell what other plug-ins you were using besides RenVerb. Plug-ins can consume very different amounts of CPU power, so it really tells us nothing if you just say you tried to use the RenVerb and three "other" plug-ins...If these 3 other plug-ins were,say, plain eq's and compressors, then YES, I would be worried and start optimizing the computer. I'm quite positive you should be able to run more eq's and/or compressors than that, even when using RenVerb.. (I've had about 30 Waves Ren Eq's running on a 400mhz G4...Nothing else, of course.) Z

hi zeus. I was running a 2 bar loop on the edit page with 5 tracks. I used 4 inserts (1 on each track) ren verb,truverb,med delay,ren 6 band eq. After that the screen slowed right down & i could'nt use any other inserts without the "cpu limit" message. i launched the session from a 24 /mono template.my cpu setting is set to 85% & i have 256 mb installed + a 40 gb ide drive for all my audio. should allocate more memory to PT LE & also the DAE folder maybe? thanks.

also does the disk cache size make a difference? i currently have mine at 1024