Is it P5 or Amplitube - Power Hogs...

Ok, so I've been digging into P5...

I'd already heard it's a bit cpu hungry, but what i'm finding is ridiculous! I'm on a P4 3.0ghz, 1 gig ram.

In P5, I have an Acid drum loop and two tracks of guitar - one rhythm, one lead. Both guitars are through Amplitube. With this alone, I am using 13%cpu with WDM drivers at 12ms latency; 15% with ASIO at 9.8ms latency. Wow!

If I add Dimension and lay down a bass line, my cpu jumps up to 23%. This is four tracks, about twenty-four measures! That's crazy; in Sonar I bet I'd barely be using one or two percent. Is Amplitube a major resource hog? I know Dimension is, so I expected that. But 15% on three tracks????

How do you guys complete a song? Any comments would be greatly apreciated folks...thanks!

I can tell you this, it is NOT Amplitube. I use Amplitube in GTP3 and it barely does anything to the CPU usage. P5 seems to have a strange effect on CPU usage. It uses massive amounts of CPU power when you add instruments and effects even when you are doing nothing! I think it may be estimating how much CPU it will need as you add instruments and effects, and then reserving that amount of CPU power for its own use. I also found it uses way more CPU power than you would think is reasonable. Dave's suggestions for conserving CPU power are about all you can do.
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