DAW slows down when running Neutron Visual Mixer

[Mo Jonez]

Anyone using Neutron Visual Mixer notice Cakewalk slowing down at all?   When I add Neutron Visual Mixer - add it to my Master bus - everything in the DAW slows down a bit,  a second or so delay in things opening up, meters are a bit delayed, etc, overall the DAW runs a bit slower.  My system is pretty fast.  My buffer is at the max 1024.  Everything is bounced to tracks except some tracks have volume automation running.  15 tracks, each track with one FX. 

[reginaldStjohn]

I have seen this before, not necessarily with Neutron, but some plugins use not only CPU cycles but also Graphics that can slow the display update rate of Cakewalk down.  Is it slow only when the Neutron UI is up?

[David Baay]

I I haven't used it much but just did a quick test and am not seeing any impact on existing content of a relatively light project with Neutron  on just 6 tracks and one bus, but the UIs for the Neutron instances themselves are slow to open and they open with a flicker as do other iZotope plugins.

[Bill Phillips]

21 hours ago, Mo Jonez said:

Anyone using Neutron Visual Mixer notice Cakewalk slowing down at all?   When I add Neutron Visual Mixer - add it to my Master bus - everything in the DAW slows down a bit,  a second or so delay in things opening up, meters are a bit delayed, etc, overall the DAW runs a bit slower.  My system is pretty fast.  My buffer is at the max 1024.  Everything is bounced to tracks except some tracks have volume automation running.  15 tracks, each track with one FX. 

I'm not there yet on the mix I'm working on but I use the iZotope Music Production Suite and just updated it. I wish there was a meter on every track showing CPU and GPU load to help us understand what's going on. I know two big issues are look ahead and over sampling. So using bus and aux tracks for plugins that use either look ahead or over sampling will allow multiple audio tracks to share these resource consuming plugins. It would also be nice if the plugins with the fancy GUIs that are so useful to me had a switch to turn off the GUI (leaving just knobs and sliders) when the GUI's no longer needed.

[Mo Jonez]

7 hours ago, reginaldStjohn said:

I have seen this before, not necessarily with Neutron, but some plugins use not only CPU cycles but also Graphics that can slow the display update rate of Cakewalk down.  Is it slow only when the Neutron UI is up?

Slow whenever the Neutron plugin is inserted/running on my master bus, not only when it's open tho.  Issue is only with Neutron's Visual Mixer feature, other Neutron instances don't cause a slowdown just those with the visual mixer.  Guessing it's related to the Relay feature that allows it to read gain and panning from all of the tracks collectively then feeds those into visual mixer.  Ironically it's promoted as a "low-CPU-overhead utility" but find that hard to believe given how many tracks it's reading at the same time.

Put in a question to Izotope, so will see what they say.