Apollo x6 with Cakewalk - SETTINGS

[HOOK]

Leaving this here to help others when they have questions about settings within Cakewalk for an Apollo X unit.  On my system, these highlighted settings had to be unchecked to get it to play nice.  And it's playing VERY nicely.  I'm using ASIO drivers, but I blacked out the driver section here because that's not what it said in this screen shot.  I just didn't want confusion.

And to clarify...the Plug-in Load Balancing can be checked on my system and it will still work great.  But having it unchecked actually resulted in another 10ish% drop in audio engine use on the song file I loaded up.

Thank you, Noel Borthwick, for the tips.

My system is:

MB: Asus ROG Strix Z690-A GAMING WIFI D4

PROCESSOR: i7 12700K

OS: Win 10 Pro 64 bit

GRAPHICS: On-board Intel

MEMORY: Corsair Vengeance LPX 64GB (XMP Enabled in bios)

THUNDERBOLT ADD-ON CARD:  Thunderboltex4 by ASUS

INTERFACE: Apollo x6 - Thunderbolt 3 interface

[Noel Borthwick]

To clarify, its expected that plugin load balancing will result in more CPU use.
Load balancing makes the CPU work harder to parallelize the workload by farming out plugin processing to multiple threads. By using more CPU it can finish the processing faster so it can result in fewer glitches with some plugin heavy projects.

Another way to look at this is that multiprocessing trades CPU use for faster processing. During playback esp at lower latencies the goal is to finish all processing before the buffer size time, otherwise the audio device will cause clicks and pops.