does the slave machine have a window showing the GUI?  Is it a mac?  If its a mac and you have a screen, then run the test with VEP window open and closed, watch the CPU when you have the VEP window open for a bit and closed for a bit.  I think its probably a mac issue as well.  I have found that the problem is worse when I have my monitor in retina mode as well.

No it's Windows 10. 

You guys got me to do more work....

Here is the test I ran and the results....

The test was performed by using a tutorial score from VSL website, specfically the E.T. Score, but you can perform the the test at home with any project you like.  I basically ran the following command during the same 3 minutes of playback for the score I chose.

[code]iostat -w 3 -I -c 60 | awk '$1 !~ /^disk/ && $1 !~ /^KB/ { print $10 }'[/code]

That looks at average user CPU% every 3 seconds and spits out 60 samples over a 3 minute period.

So what are the results?  You can see a more complete collection of the data here:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1H40bkgaJ0F7VDcjhQvZlUEqCARCVLb_b/view?usp=sharing

But to summarize as average CPU% over 3mins period:

Vep6 minimized Retina display:   38.82% 

Vep6 Minimized Non-Retina:  38.12%

Vep6 Active Retina Display: 51.62%

Vep6 Active non-Retina:  49.37%

Vep7 Minimized Retina: 39.12%

Vep7 Minimized Non-Retina: 38.10%

Vep7 Active Retina: 57.93%

Vep7 Active Non-Retina: 47.93%

Summary

1. The VEP gui on both VEP6 and VEP7 takes significant CPU overhead for whatever its doing when its not minimized.
2. With the VEP gui minimized, VEP6 is slightly more efficient then VEP7 but by less then 0.5%, which is statistically irrelevant.
3. With the gui Active in non-Retina mode, VEP7 is slightly  more efficient then VEP6 by a factor of 1.5% difference, which is also somewhat insignificant.
4. With gui active in Retina/HiDPi mode, VEP7 is less efficient then VEP6 by a factor of 6%, which is somewhat significant.

Overall I think the fact that VEP needs 10-20% of CPU just to display the GUI is concerning, apparantly this was the case on VEP6 as well.  VEP7 appears to be slightly more efficient in the GUI in non-retina, but signficantly worse with Retina display.  The above is on my system, which is MacPro 5,1  12x3.33 ghz cores, 128GB ram.  Metal-capable display adapter.  Nothing else running during the tests.

ps - I ran tests with Cubase earlier, but don't have the exact results now, but in general I say that Cubase performs much much worse then LogicPro, which is what I used for the above.  Add 20-30% CPU for each of the results above, as far as what to expect from cubase, which I often saw peaking at 95% cpu utilization with the VEP gui showing.  the test above also did not have any cpu heavy plugins.  All just ViPro instruments and VSL instrument playback, MIRPro and one instance of Miracle.  Projects with synths and more FX processing I would expect to be worse.

@TimBlast said:

Same issue here. 

I rolled back to VE Pro 6 for the time beign

Ve Pro 7 with Cubase combo was just impossible to work with. Cubase would take an hour and a half to load up and would take an hour every time I was exporting a mixdown...... well its back to normal with Ve Pro 6 now. Hope they can figure it out soon

Sounds like coupled behavior on crack. I run decoupled with Nuendo, I don't see that at all. The load of VEP 7 has definitely been snappier here. Systems differ widely.

Yeah I run the VE Pro decoupled as well. It might also be network or cpu related, ve pro 7 hangs every time cubase tries to "change the condition" for exaple connecting to the server, starting mixdown, closing the session.

First of all, let me reassure you that we take any reports about CPU usage seriously, since we want VEPro to be as efficient as possible.

A busy GUI code, updating meters, peak displays, MIDI activity and other things, will always use some CPU power. The cost for updating such things tend to be a bit higher on MacOS than on Windows, due to blitting being a more expensive operation on MacOS. I don't find the CPU usage of VEPro as such to be in any way abnormal for the amount of work that is done.

In order to shed some further light on this topic, I created a performance comparison project, trying to isolate the impact of GUI updates on project performance. The results from this test, and the 16 possible test permutations, can be found in the linked PDF.

If anyone wishes to look further into the measurement data, or reproduce these findings - I am also enclosing the project files

Test Results (PDF)
Raw data and project files (ZIP)

Thanks,

Martin

@Dewdman42 said:

Try some larger hidpi settings. My system is performing much worse in hidpi mode non minimized, and vep7 is worse then vep6 in this regard by 6%. My tests were using my normal working resolution of 3200x1800 hidpi. You will need a 4K monitor and decent video card.

The fact that vep needs 15% of cpu over and above all the internal mixing engine to display meters and articulations on a Mac is disappointing. I hope vsl will look closer at that in years to come.

As I wrote in the PDF, I was using an AMD RX570 GPU and a 3840x2160 display for my tests. In HiDPI/Retina mode, this is called 1920x1080 HiDPI. I am not aware of a display that handles 3200x1800 HiDPI, which would be a native resolution of 6400x3600 pixels. Perhaps you mean 1600x900 HiDPI?

As I also wrote before, an application will always require processing power to perform updates of dynamic information on the screen. The more that's updating, the more processing power is required. I believe that VEPro is actually pretty efficient regarding this, many applications perform much worse when continuously updating so many things. We are slightly bound by the limits set by the GUI framework we're using here (Qt), but so are most other applications as well, except for Logic.

@Dewdman42 said:

No you can run 4K monitor at larger hidpi settings then 1920. Mine is at 3200x1800 hidpi and looks great, but slow on vep7

Please be aware that scaling will occur at any resolution which is not 1:1 or 1:2. I have not tested anything at these scaled resolutions, since I really don't recommend using them, but I would believe that it performs worse.

@Dewdman42 said:

This is a longer discussion I don’t feel like having here but hidpi does not require your native resolution to be double what the hidpi resolution is. Even Apple branded retina monitors have modes where it’s getting closer and closer to the native resolution but still applying hidpi technology to improve the sharpness in corners and curves. In preferences the normal hidpi setting is 2:1 it you can say “smaller text” or whatever they call it in easy terms and then it will be using a larger internal canvas that is larger then the native resolution of the actual monitor to render and then it will be reduced back down to the monitor resolution by the video card. That’s is how hidpi and retina always works, you are not constrained to 1920 resolution in hidpi.

I'm sorry, but this is not correct.

The only modes where applications fully render to pixels are the 1:1 and 1:2 modes (native and HiDPI respectively). Using any scaled modes in between, applications will render at their native 1:1 resolution, then be scaled UP by the OS. The result is blurrier than a direct mapping, and will additionally put more strain on the system. 

VEP7 does paint a few more things to screen, and yet it still performs better than VEP6 when using Native or HiDPI display modes. It might be, that the extra blitting stirs something up when using scaled modes, causing the CPU usage to tick slightly higher*.

* I have not yet tested anything myself regarding scaled modes.

it was on averge 6% worse.  I hope you might be able to figure out why someday.  I have nothing more to add here.  Will continue with you about it offline.

Just wanted to follow up to this.  After upgrading my system from Sierra to Mojave, performance with VEP7 is not only just as good as VEP6, its significantly better.  All the problems I mentioned above went away when I upgraded my Mac to Mojave.  

@Dewdman42 said:

Just wanted to follow up to this.  After upgrading my system from Sierra to Mojave, performance with VEP7 is not only just as good as VEP6, its significantly better.  All the problems I mentioned above went away when I upgraded my Mac to Mojave.  

To clarify - the higher performance in Mojave will come with the next update of Vepro 7.